A winner's guide to blackjack

Las Vegas does its best to stack the deck against you, but that doesn't mean you can't work the system too. After all, it is a game.

By Marc Cooper | Special to The Times

February 25, 2007

Blackjack at the Beau Rivage Hotel Resort in Las Vegas. (Photo by Steve Belkowitz)

Las Vegas — JUST inside the Flamingo casino a few steps off the Strip, a trio of pink-felted $5 blackjack tables attracts a raucous crowd of enthusiastic players. Booze flows freely, and the piped-in music rocks. As the dealers snap and slap cards out of the plastic table shoes, the players' chip stacks accordion up — and mostly down.

Losing in Vegas is often considered par for the course, but it's happening at the blackjack tables at an accelerating rate. And it's easy enough to see why. A simple, small-print banner on one of the tables reads "Blackjack Pays 6 to 5."

It's the sign of the times. Vegas casinos have taken to rewriting the rules, turning a relatively fair game into something less advantageous for the player. It begins with tampering with the payoffs — in this case, from the long-standing 3-2 to the far more skewed 6-5 — and not before too long, finding a straight-up, unaltered, unshaved game of blackjack in Las Vegas of all places will be a nearly impossible task.

"Wow. I had no idea. I mean, who reads the signs?" said player Rory Kane, laughing and shrugging.

Which is exactly what the casinos are counting on.

By fudging just a few of the standard rules — reducing the blackjack payout to 6-5, requiring the dealer to hit and not stand on what's called a "soft 17" (an ace and a 6), and not permitting the player to double-down on any two cards, casinos have radically skewed the odds toward the house.

For an unsuspecting visitor playing $10 bets, that one rule change of 6-5 will cost an additional $15 an hour in estimated losses, five times more than the traditional version of blackjack. Play for a weekend and do the math. It's as if you're nearly tied in a game of baseball and suddenly in the last two innings, you're told you'll get only two outs.

Trying to measure the depth of this change, I visited Las Vegas for a couple of weekdays earlier this month, spoke with players, pit bosses and the experts, and was staggered by what I found. Though the casinos didn't return my phone calls to explain this shift, a supervisor standing behind the Flamingo's tables made the point.

"Why should I play here when you pay only 6-to-5?" I asked.

She paused for a moment, then said, "Well, we call this the Party Pit," pointing out that the Flamingo's new theme is that of a Cancún-like tropical beach party. In other words, sit down, have a drink and let the good times roll. Leave all that odds making to the house.

Cruising the maze of Strip casinos, I found numerous instances of blackjack tables where the odds aren't in your favor. At Rio, another "fun"-oriented casino, the blackjack pits had a proliferation of "carnival games," which might be more at home in a carnival than in a casino. The Rio's big come-on was a bevy of stacked "single-deck" games advertised with brightly colored electronic signs.

Edge to the house

Single-deck blackjack was the most advantageous game for players when played by traditional rules, offering a microscopic .18% house edge, which means a player's estimated loss will be 1.8 cents for every $10 wagered. At the Flamingo's Party Pit, a player is estimated to lose more than 10 times that amount, nearly 20 cents for every $10.

Although 1.8 cents or even 20 cents doesn't sound like much, stretch these numbers in a four-hour blackjack session and you're looking at nearly $50, and that's if you play a perfect game.

When my search for an old-fashioned 21 table took me to the upscale Venetian, I found a couple of high-stakes tables offering a decent game of double-deck blackjack. But with a $200 minimum bet -- and figuring that a blackjack bankroll ought to be 50 times the basic wager — $10,000 seemed like an excessive amount to risk for a few hours of honest fun.

Navigating the 170,000 square feet of Vegas' biggest casino, the MGM, I had better luck. A couple of rows of six-deck $10 blackjack tables offered some acceptable rules. A 3-2 payoff for natural 21s. Dealer standing on all 17s. Re-splitting aces. Doubling on any two cards. All in all, a .26% edge for the house, or 2.6 cents lost on every $10 bet. But you have to know what to look for. Sitting right next to these decent tables were others where the odds were ominous for the player. Nearly identical looking "single-deck" tables with a 6-5 payoff and miserable odds. Sit down at the wrong table and become fish food.

Nowhere on the Strip, however, could I find as much as one table of straight-up, traditional single-deck blackjack, a game that only a few years ago was abundant, at least in downtown Vegas. And to think there was a time when this simple game offered the house only a razor-thin advantage of less than .5% (provided the player makes all the logically right decisions).

It was an arrangement that existed without dissent since Vegas was born, when blackjack was played virtually everywhere under a universal set of rules and conditions. True, when Ed Thorpe came out with his card-counting "Beat the Dealer" books in the early 1960s, the casinos responded by adding more decks to a lot of the games, but it's nothing like the rewriting of rules taking place today.

After two long days of searching, I cheated. A few blocks down from the Rio, I popped into the offices of Pi Yee Press, publishers of books by blackjack expert Stanford Wong. It also publishes the monthly Current Blackjack News, a detailed breakdown of every blackjack table in the country. It's required reading for the serious card player.

"Blackjack is deteriorating severely because of corporate stupidity," said Al Rogers, Pi Yee's general manager and a semi-retired professional gambler. "They're going to kill off their own game unless they realize at some point you can't fool all the suckers all the time forever. Playing at a 6-5 table is like paying $64 for a movie ticket that really costs $8," he said.