Month: April 2019

Every casino game, including blackjack, has an integral mathematical edge, usually referred to as the ‘house edge’, over a player in the long term. In blackjack, the house edge for the standard, six-deck version is 0.64% but, by applying basic blackjack strategy, a player can reduce the house edge to the point where it is almost negligible. Regardless of some minor – albeit often strategically important – rule variations, blackjack is essentially a mathematical game, with a fixed set of rules, a fixed number of cards in the deck(s) and, hence, only a finite number of possible card combinations. Nevertheless, every playing decision has a direct influence on the outcome of a hand.

Basic blackjack strategy is a set of rules, determined mathematically, which allow a player to make correct playing decisions, thereby maximising winnings and minimising losses. Of course, the only information available to a blackjack player is the cards in his/her hand and the card that the dealer is showing, known as the ‘upcard’. However, by reference to a blackjack strategy chart, or matrix, which shows all possible card combinations, a player can take the action that gives him/her the best chance, mathematically, of winning any hand. To allow for rule variations, such as the option to ‘double down’ – that is, to double your original bet in exchange for a single card – after splitting two cards of the same value, some of the actions in basic blackjack strategy are dependent upon house rules.

The so-called gambler’s fallacy is a commonly-held, but mistaken, belief that in a game of chance, such as roulette, sequences of one binary outcome, such as the appearance of a red number, will be balanced by the opposite outcome, such as the appearance of a black number. Worse still, the longer the sequence, the stronger the belief becomes.

Of course, in reality, each spin of a roulette wheel is an independent, random event, which cannot be influenced, in any way, by past events. Indeed, the longest recorded sequence of one colour is 32, but even shorter sequences of one colour or the other can lead to a form of distorted thinking – technically known as ‘negative recency’ – that makes gamblers believe they have a higher-than-average chance of winning.

Notwithstanding the inherent house edge which, even in the European, single-zero version of roulette, stands at 2.7%, the probability of a red or a black number appearing on a single spin of the wheel is always approximately 50:50, regardless of previous results. The appearance of the green zero renders all ‘outside’ bets, including those on red or black, losers, so the actual probability of winning on red or black is 47.37%; the point is that that probability never changes, regardless of how counter-intuitive that may seem to the gambler. Of course, the gambler’s fallacy applies not just to roulette, but also to other games of chance, including blackjack, poker and slots, which operate on the same hard-and-fast laws of mathematical probability.