Effect of Rules – A New Look

Obviously some rules are better than others. We will take a look at the effect of rules on the house edge in this section.

First, a few words about the cut-card effect. Some single-deck games and nearly all hand-dealt shoe games deal to a specified point marked by the cut-card and then shuffle after the current round ends. On the other hand, some single-deck games deal a fixed number of rounds depending on the number of players. The cut-card effect is the effect on advantage caused by dealing to a fixed point instead of a fixed number of rounds. It is known that using a cut-card increases the house edge. The reasons are discussed in the “How Blackjack Works” chapter. Now here is the problem. Nearly all books provide house edge calculations assuming that there is no cut-card — that a fixed number of rounds are dealt, even though the vast majority of games use a cut-card.

The reason that books use the fixed-rounds numbers is that they can be exactly calculated to any number of decimal points and are not affected by the number of players or number of hands dealt. On the other hand, if you take into account the cut-card, the number can vary depending on players and rounds dealt. I have never been happy about this since the numbers do not realistically calculate the real house advantage, and so I decided to take a deeper look.

What I found was that the cut-card effect was less affected by the number of hands than has been generally assumed — with the exception of single-deck games that often do not use a cut-card anyway. This is good news. It means that we can generate house edges that do include the cut-card effect that are reasonably accurate no matter where the cut-card is placed.

There is another problem. Rules and number of decks interact with each other. You cannot simply provide an edge for each rule and sum them up for a total edge. It will be close, but will ignore some interactions.

The charts in this section will provide the edges that include the cut-card effect and interactions for the common rules and numbers of decks assuming that you play perfect Basic Strategy.

The CVData and CVCX Blackjack simulators were used to calculate all numbers in this chapter.

 © 2009 Norman Wattenberger