Doubling-down is perhaps the single best way of reducing the house edge when playing a blackjack session. By doubling your stake in a very strong position you can capitalise on these positions of strength and swing the balance of power away from the dealer. If the dealer does have blackjack, you will win your side bet but lose your original bet. This may get you back some money in the short-term, but long-term the bet makes the casino money. Beginner players have no way of knowing if the dealer has a card worth ten points face-down under an ace. Learn Basic Strategy and stick to it. The player should always assume that the card they can’t see is.

1. Best Way To Win Big In Blackjack Real Money
2. How To Win Casino Blackjack
3. Big Blackjack Wins

Learning how to win money in a Las Vegas casino isn’t the hardest thing in the world to do. People win money in Vegas casinos every day, in fact.

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But the odds are against you.

Best Way To Win Big In Blackjack Real Money

That’s why the casinos are still in business and make so much money. They’ve designed the games and payouts so that you can’t win in the long run. They even have a word for the mathematical disadvantage the games offer you—it’s called “the house edge.”

The good news is that the house edge is a long-term phenomenon. Anyone can win money gambling in the short term. In fact, if they couldn’t, the casinos would go out of business because no one would play there.

Some gamblers do a better job of winning money at Vegas casinos than others, though. This post looks at what they do differently so that you can do it, too.

1- Build a Gambling Bankroll

The first step to winning money in a Las Vegas casino is having a gambling bankroll. This is money that you’ve set aside for the purpose of gambling with. It should be money you don’t need for other purposes.

The reason you need a gambling bankroll is because you can’t win money without first risking money. That’s how gambling works. And if you don’t set aside money for this purpose, you’re liable to bet money you can’t afford to lose just to get into and/or stay in action.

How big a bankroll do you need?

How To Win Casino Blackjack

If your goal is to stay in action forever at a negative expectation game, you need an infinitely large bankroll. Luckily, that’s not the goal for most thinking people.

You should base the size of your bankroll on your goals. Which games do you want to play? How much are you planning to bet at that game? How much time do you want to spend gambling?

If you want to play blackjack for $100/hand, you need more than $200 to get in any time at the table. Lose 2 bets in a row, and you’re out of action almost immediately. That’s no fun. Most people want to spend more than 5 minutes at the gambling table.

With a blackjack bankroll of $200, though, you might be able to play for an hour or 2 at the $5 tables.

Frank Scoblete offers interesting bankroll management advice for gamblers who play casino games. These are usually based on what it takes to make a quick win. Some of his money management techniques are misleading, as they don’t increase your probability of winning. But his bankroll management advice can help you avoid going broke before getting your fill of fun at the table.

Scoblete suggests having a bankroll of 1000 units for a casino visit, and dividing it up as follows:

• 800 units for blackjack
• 130 units for craps
• 10 units for roulette
• 10 units for baccarat
• 40 units for poker
• 1 unit for video poker
• 9 units for sports betting

According to Scoblete, this works out to this much gambling on your gaming activities:

• 4 hours a day for blackjack
• 2 hours a day for craps
• 1 hour for all the other games

Obviously, you can see that blackjack and craps are far and away his recommended games. In this respect, at least, Scoblete is on the money. These are probably the best 2 casino games you can play, especially if you can avoid the sucker bets at the craps table.

More about those in the next section…

2- Stay Away from the Sucker Bets

Some casino games offer nothing but sucker bets.

But what’s that mean?

A sucker bet is a bet that only suckers make because the house edge is so much higher than it needs to be. An example of a sucker bet is the game of keno, which usually has a house edge of 15% or higher. (And I’m being generous with that number—most keno games have a house edge of 25% or more, making it marginally better than the lottery, but not by much.)

Some gamblers think American roulette is a sucker bet because of its house edge of 5.26%. If you’re playing in a casino that offers both American roulette and European roulette (which has a house edge of 2.70% or 1.35% depending on the rules), American roulette is certainly a sucker bet. But if American roulette is the only option available, and if you really enjoy the game, it’s not really a sucker bet.

Other casino games, though, have multiple betting options. Some of them have a low house edge, while others have a ridiculously high edge. Craps is the best example of this kind of game. The basic bet in craps is the pass line bet, which has a house edge of 1.41%.

But the proposition bets at the craps table have house edge figures well in excess of 10%. You’d have to be a sucker to place a bet at a table that will result in 7X or 8X the losses in the same time.

How do you know which games and which bets are the sucker bets?

Just spend some time researching the house edge for various games. Baccarat, blackjack, craps, and video poker traditionally offer the best odds. Slot machines and keno are on the other end of the spectrum, offering the worst odds in the casino.

Most of the other games are somewhere in between.

Of course, unless you’re an advantage player (like a card counter), all casino games have a negative expectation. This means if you play long enough, you’ll eventually lose all your money. From the perspective of an advantage gambler, who only bets when he has an edge, all these casino games offer sucker bets.

But for the recreational gambler, your goal should be to get maximum game fun for the least amount of money. Your goal should also be to walk away a winner if you can.

Your best chance of doing so is to stick with the games with the best odds.

Poker games are another thing, entirely. That’s a game of skill, and I encourage you to learn to play poker and play it well. Since you’re competing with other poker players for their money, you don’t have to worry about a house edge. You just need to be more skilled than most of the other players at the table.

Sports betting is another thing, too. The bookmakers set up the odds so that they’re going to make a profit, so it’s hard to get an edge, but they’re not perfect. If you’re better at picking winners than they are, you can get an edge over the books, too. In fact, if you’re really good at handicapping, your best chance of leaving the casino with a lot of money is by putting money into action in the sports book.

3- Stick with a Strategy for the Game You’re Playing

Most games have no strategy other than avoiding the worst bets at the table. Some games require you to make decisions about how to play your hand, though. The latter are the games with the best odds.

No matter which kind of game you play, you should go into it with a strategy and stick with that strategy. Ignore your hunches and psychic insights about what’s going to happen next. Just make the best possible bets you can.

Roulette is a game with a simple strategy. Most casinos in Las Vegas offer what’s called “American” roulette. Every bet on that roulette game but one offers a house edge of 5.26%.

There’s one exception:

The 5-number bet has a house edge of 7.89%. Since that’s significantly more than all the other bets at the table, the best strategy is to never make that bet.

You can then decide how you want to bet on the other roulette numbers based on your tolerance for risk and your desire for a big payout. If you like frequent small wins, stick with the even-money bets. The probability of winning those bets is close to 50% (47.37%), but you only win even money.

On the other hand, if you don’t mind losing for a while, you can place a single number bet. That pays off at 35 to 1, but the probability of winning that bet is only 1/38, or 2.63%.

You can also place a plethora of bets with payouts and probabilities between those 2 options.

With a game like blackjack, though, the house edge varies based on how well you play your hands. In blackjack, there’s a mathematically correct move to make in every possible situation. This is called “basic strategy.”

A player using basic strategy in blackjack only faces a house edge of 0.5% to 1%. If you ignore basic strategy and just play your hunches, you’re probably giving the house an extra 3% to 4%.

That’s a huge difference. If you’re going to play blackjack, you should at least learn a simplified version of basic strategy to keep the house edge as low as possible

Also, even if you use perfect basic strategy in blackjack, the house still has an edge. Play long enough, and you’ll lose all your money.

But when you reduce the house edge as much as possible, you increase the probability of walking away from a Las Vegas casino as a winner.

You can find detailed articles about every casino game you can imagine on this site. Those articles all cover the appropriate strategies to use for these games.

4- Quit While You’re Ahead

No one can win money in a Las Vegas casino if they continue to play. Since the casino games have an edge, you’re likelier to lose than win, and every bet you make brings you that much closer to the long run. The Law of Large Numbers suggests that the more trials you get involved in, the closer your actual results will mirror the mathematically expected results.

This means that if you hit a big win early in your casino visit, it’s a good idea to set aside at least some of those winnings rather than gambling them all. I once won $6000 on a slot machine on my 6th spin of the reels. I immediately cashed out and set $3000 aside to make sure I could go home with a profit. (My bankroll for the entire trip was $1000, so I still had about $4000 to play with for the rest of my stay in Vegas.)

You’ll find some writers talking about money management and the importance of setting win goals and loss limits. An example of a win goal is someone with a $1000 bankroll who decides he’ll quit once he’s ahead by $200. That’s a win goal of 20%.

A stop loss limit, on the other hand, is an amount of money you’re willing to lose before quitting. With a $1000 bankroll and a 20% stop loss limit, a gambler would quit when his bankroll got down to $800.

Here’s the thing about win goals, stop loss limits, and money management:

None of these techniques change the house edge. No matter when you walk away from the tables, unless you walk away permanently, the house edge will eventually come into play in your casino game hobby.

Yes, you should quit when you get ahead.

Or at least set aside enough winnings that you can go home a winner.

Just realize that this concept doesn’t increase your chances of winning money in a Las Vegas casino in the long run. It just makes sure that you sometimes go home a winner. You’ll go home a loser more often, but not as often if you occasionally quit while you’re ahead.

5- Don’t Be Afraid to Go Big or Go Home

The last time I visited the Winstar, I had a small bankroll of just $200.

But I also had a plan.

I was going to bet $100 on odd. We chose that because my traveling companions and I decide that we were all odd people, so that might be lucky for us. (I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the odds of winning were 47.37% regardless of whether we bet on odd or even.)

That was half my total bankroll for the trip on a single bet. I wanted to go big or go home. I was going to use the other $100 to bet on craps, actually, but I was just going to stick with the $5 bets.

But it was a Saturday night at the Winstar, and they only recently started offering real roulette and real craps. Prior to this change, they generated results using playing cards instead of wheels and dice.

As a result, the tables were so crowded I couldn’t get anywhere near them. I wound up playing Lightning Sevens and The Big Lebowski slot machines, instead.

I still broke even for the night, but that was all luck.

Still, there’s much to be said for making one big bet instead of making lots of small bets. I’ve written about something called “maximum boldness” in gambling before. The idea is that making a single big bet on a negative expectation game offers you a better probability of doubling your money than making any combination of multiple, smaller bets.

This is because of the Law of Large Numbers, which I think I’ve already mentioned.

Here’s the easiest way to understand it, though:

You goal is to make $1000 on a single bet in roulette. You choose black (or any other even number.) You have 2 possible outcomes:

1. You could win $1000.
2. You could lose $1000.

Possibility #2 is more likely, but those are still the only 2 possibilities.

Now suppose you make 2 bets of $500 each. Here are the possible outcomes:

1. You could win both bets, for a $1000 profit.
2. You could win bet #1 and lose bet #2, which results in you breaking even.
3. You could win bet #2 and lose bet #1, which also results in you breaking even.
4. You could lose both bets, for a $1000 loss.

The likelihood of these events varies, but you’re more likely to lose both bets than you are to win both bets. That’s obvious. But you also have 2 other possibilities which are also pretty likely.

And obviously, the more bets you make, the more possibilities are out there. Suppose you make 4 bets of $250 each:

1. You could win all 4, doubling your money.
2. You could win 3 and lose 1, which would result in a profit.
3. You could win 1 and lose 3, which would result in a loss.
4. You could win 2 bets and lose 2 bets, which could happen in multiple ways, and you’d break even.
5. You could lose all 4 bets.

The reason casinos make money is because they’re in it for the long run.

Wanna beat the casinos?

Decide to get happy with wins in the short run.

6- Spend Some Time Doing Other Things in Las Vegas, Too

It’s hard to win money on any kind of gambling if you’re tired or bored. Gambling is supposed to be fun. If you’re gambling compulsively to the point where you’re uninterested in any other activity, you’re in trouble.

Luckily, in Las Vegas, you can find lots of things to do. Heck, just walking around Downtown or the Las Vegas Strip can be loads of fun. There are free shows right on The Strip, too—the water fountains at the Bellagio and the pirate show at the Mirage cost you nothing. You can even go see circus acts at Circus Circus.

Spend some of your entertainment money on other forms of entertainment. Think about hitting a couple of the cool museums in town. Whether you like organized crime or nuclear experiments, Las Vegas has a museum to help educate you about it.

And you won’t find a better selection of shows anywhere on the planet.

The number and variety of bars and nightclubs is staggering. So is the number of restaurants.

Don’t just gamble.

Enjoy some of what else Vegas has to offer.

7- Learn How to Play Poker, Please

If I could convince you of one thing, it’s this:

If you want to win money in a Las Vegas casino, stay away from the “casino games” entirely and play poker.

Not all Vegas casinos have cardrooms, but find one that does. Learn how to play poker and learn how to play the game well.

The skill element is what sets poker apart from the other games. The casinos take a 5% cut of every pot, which means you can’t just sit down and break even.

But it takes less study and effort than you might think to become a break-even poker player. With a little effort, you can make a long-term profit at the Texas holdem tables.

90% of poker players don’t profit, but that means 10% of the players do. That’s a bigger percentage of Vegas winners than you’ll find playing slot machines, I promise you.

Conclusion

Anyone can come home after winning some money in Las Vegas. People do it every day. It’s easier to pull off if you stick with the games offering better bets.

Of course, learning the right strategies for the games you’re playing helps, too. Being able to distinguish between good and bad bets is one critical skill. But in games like blackjack and video poker, you must be able to make the decisions offering the best expected value, too.

Finally, if you really want to win money in Las Vegas casinos in the long run, become a solid poker player.

• Every gambler wants to know how to win at Blackjack
• The basic strategy and some math can help you get better odds
• There are 11.2 million articles on 'how not to lose at Blackjack' on the internet

Playing Blackjack can be a frustrating experience.

On the one hand, Blackjack is known to be the Casino game with the best odds of winning. But on the other one…it's impossible to win at Blackjack every time you play.

Experienced players say you only need to apply the 'optimal basic strategy' to get a better ROI and improve your chances to win at Blackjack but -

It's not that easy when you are at the table, is it?

Blackjack is an exciting game. But to keep playing, you need to know how to battle the dealer and finish your session with more chips than you begin with.

In other words, you need to know how not to lose at Blackjack.

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Blackjack is not Slots.

Unless you don't play one of those crazy (and unusually weird) variants that online Casinos offer you, you don't need to base your strategy to improve your odds entirely on luck.

In the long term, the only way for you to improve your chances to win at Blackjack is to rely on your skills and on your ability to focus. You need to know how to do the right thing every time you get your cards.

This is the only way to minimize the impact of luck — a factor the doesn't depend on you and that you'll never be able to control.

If you want to improve your chances to win, you need to know exactly what to do - every single time you are dealt your cards.

Some combinations are more helpful than others, that's true. But if it's safe to assume that you are not going to get 21 every time, you need to know how to play your cards to get more winning chances.

Big Blackjack Wins

This article tells you how to do just that.

You are going to learn how to use whatever cards you receive to beat the Dealer and win money at Blackjack.

I can't guarantee that you will win at Blackjack every time. But if you follow the pieces of advice I included in this strategy article and use all of them in your next games, you will have improved your winning chances.

Let's begin.

Basic Strategy to Improve Your Chances to Win at Blackjack

Blackjack is a game based on luck and mathematical probability.

Like it happens for all the games that are based on mathematics and probability, there are some systems you can use to increase your chances to win at the Blackjack table.

None of these systems is easy, nor they guarantee a 100% success rate.

Unless this the first article on how to win at Blackjack you read in your life, you should know by now that the Blackjack basic strategy ought to be your starting point.

As a beginner, you have just one way not to throw your money away, and that is to learn and use the basic Blackjack strategy.

Online Casinos might do anything to push you to fire up a new Blackjack game and play the way your guts tell you, perhaps with the most beautiful-looking dealer you have ever see in your life.

Don't do it.

That's not how you win at Blackjack. That's the gambling equivalent of Russian roulette. And you know how that ends.

You hit a lucky streak; you win a few hands…and things suddenly get worse.

There's nothing more dangerous than to feel in control when you aren't. You think you know what you are doing and you think you need to continue because 'Luck favours the brave'…until it's too late to quit while you are ahead.

And if you don't know when to stop - you stand no chance to win at Blackjack.

Luckily for you, it's not too hard to learn the best Blackjack strategy, even if you are a complete newbie.

Read the article I linked above and memorise the right way to play every single hand.

Then, open an account on this site to practice for free.

Continue to play for free until you are 100 percent sure that you know how to play each combination of cards. Again, Blackjack is not a game of improvisation - there are rules you need to respect.

Don't Practice at a Casino - Stay Online

Most brick-and-mortar casinos will not allow you to bring a Blackjack cheat-sheet with you at the table.

It is against their rules and, let's face it: it would make you the most ridiculous nerd in the room. And even if you want to win at Blackjack - you don't want to be that guy.

This is to say that you won't be able to check how to win your Blackjack hands. You will have no external help besides that of your brain.

If you don't remember exactly how you are supposed to play - you are doomed.

That's why you need to play online. Until practice will have made you perfect.

Follow these steps to play free games where you can apply the basic strategy:

• Open this page (opens in a different tab)
• Register an account
• Launch the free Blackjack games and practice

Once you are all set, split your screen and keep the basic strategy chart open right next to the table. That will help you to know how to play and how to take your decision fast.

Because the next time you'll play with a real dealer, they will not let you much time to decide whether to hit or stand.

Attention: from here on, I am going to assume that you know the game's basic strategy. All the next tips to improve your chances to win at Blackjack are based on the fact that you know how to play.

If you don't, go back and practice Blackjack online over and over again.

Do that, and you'll be ready to continue.

Do Blackjack Online Courses Work?

There are 15,100,000 pages dedicated to Blackjack courses on Google. That's three times the population of Denmark.

The problem is - over 90 percent of those courses come from people who never won anything at the table. The only money they make comes from their courses, not from their skills.

As a longtime LinkedIn aficionado, I once took one of the courses to win at Blackjack they host on their learning platform Lynda.com.

What a boatload of c*ap that was.

Do you know what the most painful part of the course was? To discover that more than 6,000 people wasted their money on that.

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Mixing impossible calculations with Captain Obvious-like revelations, the whole aim of the course was to convince you to buy another course where you would finally find the secrets you missed to win at Blackjack.

How's that for upselling?

The truth is that winning at Blackjack is much easier than you think.

You just need to play cum grano salis, as my professor of Ancient Latin and Greek used to say.

And that's because the first secret to becoming a winning Blackjack player has nothing to do with hitting or folding.

If you want to be a winner, you need to behave like one.

Don't Try to Predict Patterns

You don't have to be a genius to know that you can't beat a casino.

That's how the gambling business works. The house has an advantage over the players - so the longer you play, the higher are the chances that the house will win.

Do hot and cold streaks exist? Probably.

Can you plan or control them? You wish.

Flip a coin 100 times, and it won't come up in a pattern of heads-tails-heads-tails-heads-tails all the way to 100.

There will be streaks of heads and streaks of tails.

How to predict that? Perhaps only Fibonacci knew that. Too bad it's a little too late to ask him now.

As a gambler, your job is not to force faith and find impossible ways to guess what will happen. It's to win as much as possible and leave before your winnings are gone.

And it all starts from picking the right Blackjack table.

Fewer Decks Can Make You Win More

Single deck games are rare in most casino these days. But remember this: the fewer the decks are, the easier it is to keep track of the face cards.

As you are going to see very soon, that's a key factor to win at Blackjack online and live.

While 'card counting' is not allowed, there's nothing wrong with keeping a general count of how many face cards have come out.

Be smart about that and this will be enough for you to get a little more adventurous with your play when you know that a lot of them have yet to appear.

Read the Rules of Your Game

Everything you see on a Blackjack table tells a story.

Everything is a piece of a puzzle you have to complete before you put your money on the line.

Here's an example?

A table that pays Blackjack at 3-to-2 odds will make you more money than one that pays at 6-to-5.

Even better:

Did you know that a table where the dealer has to hit on a soft 17 makes the house more money?

And guess where does that money come from...

That's why you should never sit to play at a table you know nothing about.

Table selection is essential to win at Blackjack and you can choose the right table only if you have the information you need.

Choose where you sit down based on the table's rules – not on whether the dealer is pretty or plain out-of-this-world-sexy.

You are there to win money, not to pick up a dealer.

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The Oscar System

Do you remember how alleged Blackjack experts make money online?

They sell 'systems to win at Blackjack' to people who would spend a fortune to find an easy way to win.

Too bad none of those revolutionary and proven Blackjack winning system work, though.

The game of Blackjack is based on probability, meaning most of those systems are just plain nonsense.

The only real Blackjack system that works does not deal with cards – it deals with money management.

It's called Oscar System, and here's how it works.

The key to improving your winning chances at Blackjack is to approach the game with the right mindset.

Don't look at a night of Blackjack as one long game with endless swings. See it as a long series of individual sessions.

Why?

Because the goal in each session is to win at least one chip (whatever denomination you may be playing).

As soon as you are a 'winner' and you have scored that one chip, the session ends and you start fresh.

If you want to use the Oscar System to win at Blackjack, you need to follow four basic rules:

• Whenever you win, increase your bet by one chip
• Whenever you lose, play the same amount you just be
• If you made any money in the session, pocket your winnings and start the progression again.
• Never try to come out ahead more than one unit – in other words, if you're down by one chip, your maximum bet would be two chips (which would still make you a winner).

Let's see this strategy in action.

In this example, we start with a one-chip bet.

I will use the symbols (-1), (+1) and so on to indicate where you stand in the game.

Example 1:

Bet	Result	Standing	Comment
1	Lose	(-1)	We lost, so we repeat the same bet
1	Win	(0)	We won, so we 2x the bet
2	Win	(+2)	We made money. The session ends with a two-chip profit

Example 2:

Bet	Result	Standing	Comment
1	Lose	(-1)	We lost, so we repeat the same bet
1	Lose	(-2)	We lost, so we repeat the same bet
1	Lose	(-3)	We lost, so we repeat the same bet
1	Win	(-2)	We won, so we 2x the bet
2	Win	(0)	Since we never try to come out more than one unit ahead, we just bet one chip
1	Win	(+1)	We made money. The session ends with a one-chip profit

By limiting your losses and by controlling your bets you increase the chances to stay ahead and to keep all the money you win on Blackjack intact.

The Oscar System is structured in a way that your winnings are always safe.

You only play with the initial capital, the bankroll you set before you started to play your first mini session.

This way it only takes a few wins in a row to recover any losses. That's because you only 2x your bets after the first win.

Sure, it could happen that you will have to dig deep to build back to a winning session, but experiments with this system show it's your best chance to win money at Blackjack.

That's all there is to it.

Follow the optimal strategy, choose the right Blackjack table, and use the Oscar System to break your play up into a lot of small sessions.

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Disclaimer: Gambling is a game of chance and there's no sure-fire formula that guarantee winnings. You can improve your winning chances by using the right in-game strategies but there is no way to predict when a machine or a Casino game is going to pay. Also, this page contains affiliate links. If you click through and play, we might earn a commission. That’s what allow us to keep CasinoSmash free and bring you the best online Casino bonuses!