Blackjack Dealer Mistake Free Bet

Looking at the blackjack chart, the blackjack strategy card tells us to stand whenever you have 17 points or more in your hand, regardless of what the dealer is showing for an up card. Reduce the value of your hand by one point to 16, and the chart says to stand when the dealer’s up card is a 6 or lower. Blackjack dealers are human and sometimes they make honest mistakes. For example, when I was playing blackjack recently the dealer inadvertently gave a fellow player a hit card (which was exposed) even though he had given a hand signal to stand. In a normal blackjack game, any time the dealer makes a mistake, the bet is a push. But one more stipulation of Johnson’s game is that he wanted a free bet any time the dealer made a mistake. At $100,000 per hand, this meant that Johnson could get $200k to $300k in free bets with a few dealer mistakes.

If you’re going to write about the worst blackjack mistakes you can make, you should probably start by defining what a blackjack mistake is and what makes one such mistake worse than another.

A blackjack mistake, for the purpose of this post, is a deviation from basic strategy. Mathematically speaking, every possible decision in every possible situation in blackjack has an expectedvalue. The play with the highest expected value is the correct play.

Any deviation from that (other than deviations based on counting cards) is a mistake.

How do you decide which mistakes are worse than others?

The biggest mistakes in blackjack basic strategy are the ones with the worst mathematical expectation.

Of course, some of these mistakes are so boneheaded that no one would ever make such a mistake. I’ve eliminated these mistakes from consideration.

Blackjack Dealer Mistake Free Bet Games

Here’s an example.

Blackjack Dealer Mistake Free Bet No Deposit

You have a hard total of 20. If you hit this total, you’ll almost certainly bust. That’s a terrible expected value, but I don’t know any player foolish enough to make such a mistake.

Free Bet Blackjack House Edge

With that understanding, here are ten of the worst possible basic strategy decisions you could make when playing blackjack.