Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One

I started with the fact that the strategy I had used in the casino assumed that every card had the same chance of being dealt as any other during play. This cut the casino’s edge to just 0.62 percent, the best odds of any game being offered. But I realized that the odds as the game progressed actually depended on which cards were still left in the

Even though the Goliath I was challenging had always won, I knew something no one else did: He was nearsighted, clumsy, slow, and stupid, and we were going to fight on my terms, not his. The clincher was that Vivian, despite her reservations and her preference that I play it safe, thought I could do it.

Understanding and dealing correctly with the trade-off between risk and return is a fundamental, but poorly understood, challenge faced by all gamblers and investors.

How hard is it to count? The more I practiced, the better my times, and I found that if I was able to count one deck in twenty to twenty-five seconds I could easily keep up in any game I was in, so I simply checked to be sure I was up to this standard each time before I played.

A dealer making this hole-card check would typically bend up the corner of his two cards to see what was hidden underneath. Eventually the Aces and Tens would get slightly warped. If the dealer was especially careless or if decks weren’t changed often enough, the savvy player could spot the warps before they were dealt and know where the Aces and T

A great poker player who has a good-size advantage over the other players at the table, making significantly better strategic decisions, will still be losing over 40% of the time at the end of eight hours of play.