Blackjack Basic Strategy Card Mysteries Revealed

Official Royal Flusher Black-EZ-Jack Strategy Card

So you want to learn how to play Blackjack?

I do too.

A quick recap - a guy named Edward O. Thorp used an early IBM computer to figure out an optimal way to play blackjack and published a book called "Beat the Dealer". His method evolved into what is known as Basic Strategy. Basic Strategy is a mathematician/computer guy's way of saying "put your pants on before your boots". It's a set of rules.

So, let's agree that the first stop in shaving the house edge at blackjack (to within a meagre half a percent) is to learn and play Basic Strategy.

You are now well on your way to killing it at the blackjack table - you know the words 'Basic Strategy'!

Is Blackjack Dead?

Is Blackjack dead?

Before answering that, let's consider some facts.

Traditional 21 pays 3:2 on blackjacks. That's $15 on a $10 bet. You can expect to get this about four times an hour, on average. Playing basic strategy, you can get around 99.5% payback. That is a razor thin house edge of around a half a percent.  

Horrid evil fake 6:5 Crapjack pays 6:5 on blackjacks. That's $12 on a $10 bet, $3 less. This increases the house edge by around 1.4% to a total of 1.9%.

Viewed another way, that's $12 an hour on a $10 game. Viewed even another way, they've increased the money they are going to take from you by four times.

Royal Flusher's $1000 Bankroll Las Vegas Scrouge Trip

What person in their right mind would do a 13 day trip to Las Vegas with a $1000 bankroll and $300 in expenses? Nobody.

But I'm not in my right mind and that's exactly what I set out to do. I also had the Quad Queen's credit card information, but that's not the point! My gambling bankroll was set at just $77 a day.

Is it even possible to have any fun on $77 a day? How many goodies can one person wring out of the comp system? How many of those buffet Philadelphia cream cheese tubes can I fit in my pants pocket without freezing my Liberty Bell off?

Royal Flusher's Savvy Las Vegas Diet

How can you possibly lose weight in Las Vegas (other than draining the contents of your wallet)?

Mrs. Flusher says I should lose about 40 pounds*. And I've made a good start, cleaning up my eating habits and losing 15 pounds, with a small lapse (one year and two months) after pounds 8 and 9. But I carried on. I've been good, walking Chippy almost every day. It's doing Chippy some good too, she can almost keep up now. When I started, I'd leave her little roller skates on almost the whole way, but now she only needs them for the uphill parts.

The Lost Vegas Motels of East Fremont

The fifties. The sixties. Big fast rocketship cars. Whimsical post-modern atomic design, full of flair, playfulness, but still reaching for the stars with angular fonts, sweeping curves, pastel colors, and abstract elements from the heavens themselves.

I explored Las Vegas' Fremont Street east of the downtown canopy and found the remnants of what was once a string of businesses that embody the American dream. Mom and Pop motels with cheerful names and optimistic Googie-inspired signs.

These speak of their time, when Americans vacationed and saw their world by car. A time here in Las Vegas of thriving downtown casinos that spun off a mini-strip of commerce on their periphery.