Blackjack Can Still be Beaten

All businesses need to make a profit to stay in business, and the bigger that business is, the more pressure there is to increase profits year in and year out. If you have stockholders the pressure to increase profits becomes monumental.

Casinos are big business - they are some of the biggest businesses in the world today. And they want to make as much profit as they can. Many casino companies have shareholders and these companies have to keep increasing their profit year after year. And little increases are not all that welcomed. Hungry shareholders want more and more.
That means each and every game must make the casino money and every year the casinos expect them to make more money than the year before. And, thankfully for them, each and every game does make them money, although not each and every game comes through each and every year with increased profits. We are now seeing some interesting changes in the gaming landscape - one very good and one very bad. Vegas is heralding these changes but you will soon see them in Atlantic City, Tunica, Biloxi and the Midwest.
Blackjack is a wonderful example of a game that started off in the 1940s and 1950s a far distant second behind the lion-king of craps, but with the publication in the 1960s and 1970s of card counting systems intended to beat the game, blackjack zoomed into the stratosphere. While hundreds of thousands of players now knew that blackjack was beatable and flocked to the tables, only a few hundred had the savvy, discipline, knowledge and bankroll to actually gain the edge over the house. It wasn’t smooth, however, because the casinos panicked.

When it first came to light that blackjack could be beaten, the casino executives immediately changed the rules of the game and added multiple-deck games. That panicked reaction first resulted in decreased play as blackjack players could see that they were losing more playing the same way as they had before. The new rules were rotten, the multiple-deck games torturous. If a player loses more, the tendency on many players’ parts is to stop playing. So the casinos put back all the old rules, although they did keep the multiple-deck games in their inventory, and blackjack profits then soared into the blackjack-o-sphere.

Today blackjack has five times as many players as does craps. Only those infernal slot machines have surpassed blackjack in the moneymaking category but that’s another story. Blackjack is the king of the table games.