Blackjack Casinos

House and Player Advantage - Online Casino Blackjack

Blackjack is the most popular casino game in the world. The simple objective makes it easy for beginners to learn, it does not require any specific number of players, and payouts are generally higher than other casino games. There is strategy involved and winning blackjack techniques can be learned in mere minutes. Additionally, the popularization of "counting" techniques tempts many newcomers to try their hand at the "beatable" casino game.

Blackjack is generally believed to have been invented in the 1700s in France, where a game known as "vingt-et-un" (twenty-and-one) became popular. Napoleon, though he was against card games distracting his soldiers during wartime, reportedly played vingt-et-un daily during his exile on Elba in 1814 -1815. A game known as "Seven and a half" was also played in Italy around this time, in which the point was to approach seven and half points without exceeding it. It was from this game that the term "busted" originated for players that exceeded the target total.

Vingt-et-un came to America in the early 1800s, where it was called "Twenty-One" and was popularized in 1823 in New Orleans, and slightly later in Evansville, Indiana. It was first called Blackjack by America saloon owners who paid out a bonus of ten-to-one if a player got the Jack of Spades and the Ace of Spades, a hand known as the Black Jack. It was included in the 1875 American Hoyle catalog of card games and continued to grow in popularity throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Like any card game, Blackjack attracted its share of cheaters. In this case, cheaters are players who could "count cards": a method of keeping track of the cards already dealt in order to predict the odds of getting favorable cards. Several high-profile cases came to light in the mid-to-late-twentieth centuries, including the famous MIT Blackjack Team, which has been the basis for several movies. Casinos have repeatedly tried to combat these tactics by using methods such as multi-deck stacks of cards and continuous shuffle machines, but skilled mathematicians have continued to show that it's possible to manipulate the game to the player's advantage.

However, the invention of electronic blackjack finally purified the game. For the first time, blackjack deals could be truly random. While some of the benefits of online casinos are well-publicized (games are available at any time, the convenience of playing at home, etc.), the biggest advantage may be for the casino owners themselves. Because when using a blackjack download card-counting is virtually impossible in an electronic game, online casinos don't have the extra expense of monitoring players to detect cheaters, nor do they have to face the lost revenue from professional manipulators.