People have been playing Blackjack since the middle of the 18th century. It remains one of the most popular casino games, and for good reason. If you know what you’re doing, it’s possible to play Blackjack for a long time without losing too much and sometimes even coming out on top.
Always split aces and eights. That is one of the golden rules for blackjack players but not according to a friend of mine. He insists that splitting eights against a dealer upcard of 9, 10, or ace is crazy because you are probably going to lose anyway, so why double your loss by splitting?
To illustrate why you should split 8's against a 10, check my blackjack appendix 9b. This shows expected return for any initial situation for any given play. The table shows that splitting 8's against a 10 in double deck has an expected return of -0.4706, if allowed to double after a split.
Splitting 8s is a classic defensive move in blackjack that, while not ideal, improves a bad hand of hard 16 to two average hands.
So additional rules we use: 8 decks, dealer checks for blackjack and stands on soft 17; double down on any 2 cards; blackjack pays 3:2. Under the splitting rules we used above the expected payout is 99.56% (or house edge of 0.44%).
Basically when the dealer has an 8, 9, 10 or 11 showing, then it's likely that a ten will be drawn along with that to score higher than 17 if you were to split it. The good strategy in this case is to just hit your pair of 7's (totalling 18) and hope to beat the potential 18 or higher that the dealer may have.
Blackjack Strategy for Splitting Pairs. Blackjack Strategy for Splitting Pairs. Blackjack is considered to be one of the most complicated games to play, so many professional players share their gaming experience and knowledge to help others. This is how was the basic blackjack strategy created with such a helpful blackjacks strategy chart.
Allowing double downs after splitting reduces the house edge by 0.13% to -0.42. Restricting double downs to 10 or 11 increases the house edge by 0.21% to -0.76. By using basic strategy, you can determine when you should double down based on the mathematics of the game.