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SPLITTING AND DOUBLING
The house almost always has you over a barrel when you play blackjack, but you can do some things the dealer can’t. Not only do you get paid 3 to 2 on a blackjack (the dealer only makes even money), you can also do what’s called splitting and doubling. Since in the long run you win only 44 hands out of 100 while the dealer wins 48 (the other eight hands are pushes), this is where most of the money you can make at blackjack comes from. If you couldn’t split or double, blackjack would be one of the worst bets in the online casinos.
DOUBLING
Whenever your card totals tell you you’re more likely to win and the dealer is more likely to lose, you want to double. You get to increase the size of your bet by any amount up to twice your original bet, but in exchange for doing so, you get only one card. That’s okay because the odds tell you you’re going to win enough times to make it worthwhile in the long run.
SPLITTING
Another basic blackjack rule is the ability to split pairs. If you’re dealt a pair of Eights on your $10 bet, you can choose to throw up another $10 to split them, essentially creating two hands of 8 each. But unlike doubling, you can take as many cards as you want on either hand and hopefully win twice as much. However, just because you can split a pair doesn’t mean you should. Some pairs you should never split, and others you should split only when the dealer has a certain card up. I’ll tell you how to recognize good splits later in this chapter.
The math nerds would have us believe that there is no way, no how that blackjack can be beaten without counting cards, and they use billions of computer-simulated hands of blackjack to prove it. Sure, they say, you may experience a little random variation now and then (that is, a winning streak), but in the long run, you’re going to lose two cents of every dollar bet.
So how have I personally watched what feels like billions of actual, real live hands of blackjack and seen people win, sometimes more than the odds say they should? The key is to do all you can to increase your chances of experiencing that random variation a bit beyond what simple chance would allow.
