should deposit at least $150 into your account. If you’re a high-stakes gambler and plan on using $100 chips, you should make sure you have at least $3000 in your account to cover your session. You’ll never want to lose more than 30 units, and it should always cover the average betting (1 to 4 units) per hand.
The type of bets you plan on making will help deter- mine the bankroll you should have. Flat betting (betting the same amount on every blackjack) will allow you to deposit a smaller bankroll of 15 to 20 units, which- should be enough.
Just as setting buying limits will help you control your fi nances, setting win and loss limits will allow you to stay ahead of the game and not lose it all. Remember when you’re placing your bets that it’s your money, and you’re the one who makes the decisions.
Set a Win Limit (and Log Off When You Reach It)
Now that you’ve chosen your casino, learned your basic strategy, and chosen your favor- ite version of blackjack, I presume you’ve been winning every hand, and you’re bankroll has increased. Or has it?
Great blackjack players know a great deal not only about the game, but also about the dealer, the odds, and themselves. They know when to bet high, when to hold back, when they can wait for the best hands, and especially when to cash in and call it a night. For any novice, one of the hardest times to call it a night and cash in your chips is when you are winning. “Don’t stop me now—I’m on a roll” was the expression a friend of mine used over and over. But stopping would have probably been the wisest decision; unfortunately, he always seemed to play just one or two hands too long and lose his chips to his emotions.
It’s extremely important when gambling real money at online blackjack that you never bet beyond the amount you have budgeted. If you choose to buy in for $500, don’t change your mind if you’re losing and empty your piggy bank to try and win back your original
$500. If you get into that habit, you’re guaranteed to get into deep trouble.
One of the hardest decisions gamblers have to make when they’re winning is whether to cash out when they’ve won a small profi t or continue playing in hopes that they can increase their winnings by playing just a few more hands. Most of us know what to do when we’re losing badly. We simply leave the table, log off, and call it a day.
But what about a scenario in which you’re not winning the jackpot but winning just enough money to keep you gambling?
Let’s take a look at our blackjack player Joel to learn from his decisions.
Setting a Win Limit Scenario
Joel has a bankroll of $100 with which to play blackjack at his favorite online casino. His goal is to win an additional $50 to have a total of $150. As luck would have it, Joel succeeds in doing just that. He wins his fi rst few games, and his current bankroll is $150.
Joel decides to put aside that $50 and not wager it. He decides that if he loses his original $100 bankroll, he’ll still have his $50 to assure that his blackjack session is not a total loss.
Next, Joel decides to try to double his original bankroll of $100. He knows that if he achieves this, he will be able to put away his original $100 completely and play off his winnings. Joel knows that even if he loses, he will only lose on his winnings, not on his principle.
Things are going Joel’s way at the blackjack table today. Joel is extremely lucky—not only does he double his money to $200, but he also wins an addi- tional $50. He fi nally decides to walk away from the table and log off.
Was Joel smart with his betting and his win limits? Note that in our scenario, Joel had a win limit of 50 percent. Is this a realistic limit, and is Joel’s winning session a common occurrence? NO! Joel’s win limit of 50 percent is quite high and not recommended.
It’s often recommended by professional gamblers that your win and loss limits should both be 20 percent of your bankroll. This means if you have an initial bankroll of $500, you should walk away from the table (or in this case, log off) if you win or lose $100 (20 percent of $500). As the title of this section says, set a win limit and log off when you reach it. You have to choose the number that works for you.
This is one of the hardest things to do if you’re winning. Emotionally, you may fi nd it extremely diffi cult to walk away having just won $100; but it may help to remember the deadly sin of greed that you learned about in Chapter 4, and to think of your blackjack playing as a business.
If you’re new to blackjack, you may be deceived into thinking that it is an easy game. You may assume that because you know the strategy chart, have played several games for fun, and have even won several games for real money, you can keep betting and winning.
Not so! It’s hard enough to win one or two games in a row, let alone win consistently over a long period of time like Joel did in the exercise scenario. In fact, Joel could just as eas- ily have lost his entire bankroll in one session had he not set aside some money.
Turning a tiny bankroll into a fortune is very diffi cult to achieve. Every bet you make has the possibility to give you a loss. That’s why they call it gambling. But what about the professionals winning millions of dollars at the blackjack tables on the popular television shows of late, you ask? Those winners are very few, and they will be the fi rst to tell you
Chapter 8: Advice for the Online Blackjack Player
that they have lost their share of games over the years as well. It’s also important to re- member that for every professional winning large amounts of money, there are thousands of players out there losing money at both land-based and online casino blackjack tables, so don’t get caught up in the dream that it will defi nitely happen to you if you just play the game long enough. Blackjack is still a game of chance.
Minimizing Losses and Maximizing Gains
There are some general guidelines to remember when deciding how much to bet and what limits to set. When trying to minimize your losses and maximize your gains, there are a few simple guidelines that you should follow:
✦ NEVER bet beyond your bankroll. In other words, never bet more than you can afford.
✦ NEVER increase the size of your bets to try to break even. If you’re not getting the cards you want or need, betting more will not help you. Take a break and then return to the table if you can’t quickly acquire the small 20 percent win.
✦ NEVER walk away from the table a loser. Once you’ve reached that 20 percent win, put it aside, and then play only until you break even and no longer if you are losing.
✦ NEVER stop if you are winning. Don’t set a limit on yourself if you’re winning, as long as you’re putting money aside and not betting with your newly acquired chips.
Know Your “Dealer”
Dealers in brick-and-mortar casinos may try to befriend you or even goad you into staying at the table when you should go home. The bright lights and free drinks can help them in this endeavor. You don’t face those challenges from a computerized dealer, but as you’ve seen again and again—the casino doesn’t change anything about the game unless it im- proves the odds for itself. For example, by now you’ve noticed that casinos prompt you repeatedly with the question, “Are you sure?” before letting you log off. This is very similar to the, “So sorry to see you go. Stick around!” line you’ll get in Vegas or Atlantic City.
Computerized dealers have many advantages over their casino counterparts, including the obvious lack of any human frailties whatsoever . . . or so you might think. After all, who programs those computers but human beings just like you and me (albeit ones who probably watch a lot more Star Trek). If you’re new to computers, you may make one of two antipodean assumptions: 1) the computer never makes a mistake, and 2) the computer is trying to rip me off. Of course, computers do make mistakes because the humans who program them do. Human beings also rip off other human beings, and so they may try to program software to do the same.
I’ve tried to help you pick the right casino to protect yourself just as you would in the real world, but crooked casinos aren’t unheard of. Even a casino owned by what I’ve listed as a reputable operator today could go out of business tomorrow and have its name
snapped up by a shyster. Furthermore, many casinos have similar names, and people make typos when entering a URL or use the wrong extension. The most infamous ex- ample: WhiteHouse.com, a porn site stumbled upon by those seeking WhiteHouse.gov, the actual Web site of the President of the United States.
So if only a letter or two is off in the URL, you could end up facing a dealer you think is legitimate but isn’t. This is another reason to specialize, to bookmark casinos you can trust, and to keep an eye out for any changes in the way the casino or its software looks.
These could indicate that the casino is under new management or that you’ve made a wrong turn. Even a dealer you can trust has only one goal in mind: to take your money.
As human beings, we tend to get upset even at inanimate objects or computers when something goes wrong.
Keep this temptation out of your mind, and don’t blame the dealer if you go on a losing streak. Stop the cash loss by going back to the practice games. You can avoid getting to this point, however, by using the “three strikes and out” rule or a variation of it based on your particular betting limit. Play three hands at a table, and if you lose, skip to another dealer or even another casino altogether. It’s a good rule of thumb to count your hand, anyway. It’s yet another safeguard against losing track of your time and money.
Play Your Game
Michael Jordan’s skill and dedication made him the greatest player in the history of bas- ketball. Yet when he took a shot at major league baseball after assuring his basketball superstardom, he found his gifts didn’t transfer from the big orange ball to the small white one. He spent some time with the minor league Birmingham Barons, but never did bat for the team’s parent club. What can this experience teach us about blackjack? Ask yourself, “Can anyone doubt that this gifted athlete could’ve achieved legendary status on the baseball diamond had he chosen to hone the skills needed for America’s pastime?”
Don’t set winning a lot of money as your goal. Set out to be the very best blackjack player you can be, and the money will follow.
Yes, it’s a safe bet that we would have heard of number 23 no matter what sport he chose to play, but at some point he had to choose. He had to focus on being the best he could be with one ball, under one set of rules. He zeroed in on basketball, of course, and the
Chapter 8: Advice for the Online Blackjack Player
rest is history. Now imagine what would’ve happened had Jordan given up on basketball back in Wilmington, North Carolina when Laney High School cut him from the sopho- more varsity team. What if he’d returned to his childhood love, baseball, only to wash out there or get bored, and then dabbled in the other game he enjoyed, football?
Had he jumped from one sport to the next and back again whenever he faced adver- sity or a loss, Michael Jordan would never have developed the unique set of skills he needed to excel in any one arena of play. The number 23 would mean nothing more to basketball fans than any other. The lesson here is, if you want to enjoy success at blackjack, then play blackjack. Play your style, your odds, and your rules. Choose one game you love and then eat, breathe, and sleep it just as a young Michael Jordan did when preparing to meet his destiny.
Don’t give up and let weeks or months pass between games. Don’t switch to poker or craps or one of the fad games. As mentioned in the previous chapter regarding some of the new 21 games out there, casinos tinker with blackjack in a million ways, but with only one result: The odds get worse for the player. The house hopes you’ll grow bored with playing standard blackjack or frustrated with losing and let them tempt you with promises of big payouts or clever gimmicks. Instead, you must play your game.
Know Your Strengths and Weaknesses
How-to books on interviewing for a job routinely tell you to prepare for a prospective employer to ask, “What are your strengths and weaknesses?” They may suggest you write your answers down on a sheet of paper with a line down the center, one side headlined Strengths and one headlined Weaknesses. They may also set a number of each for you to list. Five appears frequently as a standard fi gure because it encourages you to even out qualities on both sides without drawing inane “strengths” such as good posture at the computer desk.
Many people have a hard time admitting their weaknesses in life, not because they don’t see any but because they’re all too aware of them. This makes confronting and working to improve them diffi cult, so people often choose to push their strengths in an effort to compensate. For example, a math whiz who’s lousy at visual memorization may rely on calculating the odds for given hands rather than commit the strategy cards to memory.
This is a mistake the casino hopes you’ll make.
When we try this compensation strategy, the human mind plays a cruel trick on us. If we succeed, it credits our strength, and when we fail, it blames whatever defi ciency we were trying to cover up. This deepens our shame and unwillingness to shore up our skills. Obviously, your strengths help you perform a given job successfully—in this case, blackjack. But your weaknesses, as in an interview, shouldn’t be looked at as the exact opposite of strengths—meaning things that will hinder your performance. Rather, you should look at your weaknesses as things that need work. They aren’t permanent, nor are they fl aws in your character.
Be honest with yourself as you study blackjack. If the word “weakness” bothers you, develop a personal metaphor that sounds less negative. You can think of your blackjack skills as any number of sports position players you admire with something to work on, or as a classic ’50s car that starts up fi ne but with a noisy muffl er you’ll need to patch before it’ll be up for street racing. Don’t let a weakness go so long that you throw up your hands in disgust. Expect to have areas that need work; seek those areas out and dedicate your- self to practicing the skills necessary to turn them into strengths.
In the previous section, I mentioned Michael Jordan, so let’s consider his example as we view our own shortcomings. Jordan’s older brother beat him consistently in one-on-one pickup games for years, and his varsity coach cut him from the team his sophomore year.
His “airness” confronted the weaknesses in his game, practicing on the court every wak- ing moment and even sometimes when he was half asleep. He later recalled, “Whenever I was working out and got tired and fi gured I ought to stop, I’d close my eyes and see that list in the locker room without my name on it, and that usually got me going again.”
It’s worth going into depth about weaknesses here because I’m talking to beginner play- ers, and this is a major pitfall that faces anyone learning something new. I have tried to emphasize your strengths throughout this book. The ability to recognize your weaknesses is itself a strength, as is the commitment to work on them by reading more, playing prac- tice games, or seeking out a friend and asking him to specifi cally look for your Achilles’
heel. Compliments are nice, but they’re worth literally nothing compared to constructive criticism. After all, you know whether or not you’re a good player based on how much you win. When you’re losing, you need to fi nd out why, and fast, before you become so sick of the game you give up entirely.
Play Aggressively
So now you know your own strengths and weaknesses. Then you should be able to an- swer the following questions:
✦ Are you happy walking away when you’ve accumulated a small profi t?
✦ Do you fi nd yourself risking this small profi t on the possibility that you could win a large profi t?
✦ Do you feel satisfi ed when you take home that small profi t?
✦ How much happier would you feel if you were to win twice as much?
✦ How much worse would you feel if you risked that small profi t and lost it all?
All blackjack players are different. You may have different answers to these questions than I do. Some gamblers are aggressive, and others, like me, are conservative. I like to play a number of quick games for a short period of time, and if I’m winning, take my money and run when I fi nd myself up by that 20 percent discussed earlier. But that doesn’t mean that it’s the only way, or even the correct way. Plenty of successful gamblers play far more aggressively than I do. So when should you be aggressive, and how?
Chapter 8: Advice for the Online Blackjack Player
Playing aggressively and risking a solid hand against the dealer’s up-card may get you to your 20 percent (or higher) profi t faster than if you had bet conservatively. For example, if the dealer’s up-card is a 7 or higher, there is a signifi cant chance he will make a good hand of 18, 19, 20, or 21. If your two-card hand is less than 18, you may want to be more aggressive and take another card, risking a bust to try to get a better hand. (There are rare times when many blackjack professionals throw basic strategy out the window and risk busting for a chance at winning big.) Additionally, if you’re holding an Ace, you may fi nd yourself more aggressive than if you weren’t holding a soft hand. You might even hit on a 17, depending on what the dealer is holding.
Playing aggressively is not a bad thing, and betting aggressively can also bring you plenty of dollars. You’ll look at this in detail in Chapter 9, “Online Blackjack Tournaments,” where I discuss tournament betting.
Keep Records
Record keeping is the onlyway you can know if you are a winning player or not. Period.
Don’t believe the players who don’t keep records yet tell you that they’re winning. These players don’t want you to think they don’t know how to play or that they’re losing a lot of money. I recently asked a friend of my husband, who was heading to Atlantic City for a weekend tournament, if he kept records and was a winning player. He responded by telling me that he didn’t keep records, but he knew he was a winner because he had placed third at a recent tournament. But what about all the sessions playing online and at land-based casinos that prepared him for these tournaments? Was he forgetting these sessions, or did he lose only occasionally? How could he or I know for sure if he was re- ally a winner if he wasn’t keeping records? Could he just have had a few winning days at that particular tournament?
All of these questions are legitimate. It is possible he had several small losses that he was conveniently forgetting about. These losses, when totaled, could very well have added up to a net loss rather than a net gain, making him not quite the winner he claimed to be. So it’s important to remember that unless you keep accurate records of all blackjack play, you may also remember your tournament wins and forget your everyday losses. Records will not let you conveniently forget!
When I play blackjack online, I always keep records. At one point, I was playing at ap- proximately 30–40 different casinos at a time (while doing research for articles and this book), and my win and loss records became diffi cult to keep track of; however, normally I keep a separate gaming log on my laptop for each casino at which I play blackjack.
My personal logs include the following information:
✦ Date
✦ Time of day
✦ Online casino name