Yesterday was hard work for me, in fact I was so shattered by the end of the day that I cancelled our usual Friday night casino trip. I was fast asleep by 10pm and snoring like a trooper in my armchair (according to my partner). It was a bad day all round, lost my Internet connection and spent several hours of making phone calls and listening to annoying music first with BT and then with my ISP provider.
I couldn’t even be certain that it wasn’t my router that was the problem and went out and purchased a new router out of desperation. I had work to do and business meetings to attend and still had no connection last night and had to use a colleagues business computer to send several important emails. Anyway, got up this morning and all is fine as it was a fault with my broadband which was fixed at their end late last night.
Anyway I promised to teach you basic strategy this weekend. Well the bad news is that I cannot teach you perfect basic strategy because there is no such thing. Much depends on where you are playing and what the rules are. Because I don’t know where you are playing then I will be forced to give you a generic basic strategy that will do about 99% of the job.
In fact on second thoughts I may have to fragment this over several posts as it may be longer to put down than I first imagined. So I will start off with hard totals first.
18……..always stand
17……..always stand
16……..stand if dealer has 2-6 otherwise hit
15……..same as above
14……..same as above
13……..same as above
12……..only stand if dealer has 4,5 or 6 and hit against all other totals
Obviously if your total is 11 or less then you take a card because you can only improve your position by hitting. Don’t try doing stupid things like standing on 7 because you “think” that two picture cards are due and the dealer has a 5 showing. This is ludicrous and will cost you money in the long term irrespective of how successful you may be on any one individual hand…..ditto with hands that are 17 or higher.
So the next stage is to learn this data first and then I will provide you with the rest of it in the coming posts.
see you soon
Carl “The Dean” Sampson
