I love blackjack.

I really do. The hours I spend at those green felt-covered tables are exciting and often profitable. Yes - I said "often". I don't always win. Nobody does. If you're planning on replacing your income from your 9 to 5 job with a professional blackjack career, you have a hard road in front of you.

I know that's not what you want to hear but I'd be doing you a disservice if I told you that becoming an expert at this game is a breeze. But - and this is a big "but" - if you are willing to put in some time and learn basic strategy, money management, and at least a low-level card counting system, you will probably be able to tip the odds in your favor.

You see, blackjack is, in my opinion, the best game in the house. Casinos vary in their rules, but in general the best odds are in this fascinating game sometimes called 21.

I don't want to get into this right now - details to follow in subsequent posts - but the varying rules from casino to casino can make an amazing difference in the player's chances to win more than he or she loses.

The Bottom Line

And winning more than you lose is the bottom line. Winning more than you lose every day is the goal, but I'll accept winning more days than I lose as an acceptable result. And further - I want to win more on each of the good days that I lose on any of the bad days.

Make no mistake - you can be in this position but it won't happen overnight. You'll absolutely have to study the Basic Strategy Table at the very least. People who tell you that they play pretty often and that they win more than they lose - but that they don't pay attention to basic strategy are lying to you - pure and simple. Let me repeat that - if they tell you that they don't follow the basic strategy table they are lying ... LYING!

Oh sure, there's such a thing as luck and a first timer with no knowledge can leave the blackjack table with a nice little profit. He might even do it more than once. But sooner or later the sky will fall and he'll lose his shirt. There aren't many guarantees in life but here's one for you:

If you play blackjack even a few times you will lose more than you win if you don't know basic strategy.

Money Management

The second key to success is learning a solid money management system. By this I mean a plan whereby you raise or lower your bets based on the past few previous hands and whether you won them or not.

We'll get into this in later posts, too.

Card Counting

This is the the third, and perhaps most vital, key. There is so much confusion about card counting. Some of the misunderstanding has been fostered by popular movies where the hero either performs some superhuman feat of mathematics or counts the cards properly but takes an unreasonable risk based on the false assumption that card counting will always work, on every hand. It won't. What it will do is tip the odds in your favor so that you can win more than you lose (there's that phrase again).

As I said earlier, the house odds against the blackjack player are narrow - just to work with an example - let's say a "generous" casino has an edge of less than 1%. This may not sound like much, but it guarantees the casino a profit in the medium to long run.

Remember, that 1% edge assumes that every player uses basic strategy, money management and card counting. The majority don't. And those are the players that keep the casino profitable. And that's good for us. If everyone won, the casino owners would move into another line of work pretty soon.

Learning to count cards should increase your odds by enough (combined with money management techniques) to counteract that 1% and put you in the winning position. Again, in the long term.

Let's you and I occupy that rarefied space where the winners live. Keep checking this site for more and detailed information on this great game.

Until next time, good luck. And use basic strategy - no splitting tens, now! You hear?