by Henry Tamburin
Wanna make a bet that will double your money? All you have to do is pick any card from this shuffled deck. If it’s a 10 or picture card, I’ll pay you twice your bet. If it’s not, you lose only your original bet. Wanna play?
If I asked you how many 10 and picture cards are in a single deck of cards, what would you say? Of course, there are 16 10-value cards: the four 10s, Jacks, Queens, and Kings. We also know that the rest of the 36 cards in the deck are non-10-value cards. With this tiny amount of information, we can analyze the above proposition.
Since there are 16 10-value cards, this means you’ve got 16 ways to win and 36 ways to lose. The odds of winning are therefore 36-to-16, or 2.25-to-1. Compare this to the payoff odds in the proposition, which are 2-to-1 (you bet $1 and win double, or $2). Since the odds of picking a 10-value card from the deck (2.25-to-1) exceed the 2-to-1 payoff odds, you’ve got the worse of it. In fact, you would lose $4 on average for every $52 you bet on this proposition, giving your opponent a massive advantage of 7.7 percent. You would be stupid if you got suckered into making this proposition bet.
So what’s all this got to do with blackjack? Plenty, because what I described is in fact the identical proposition that the casino offers its blackjack players, only it’s disguised as an insurance bet.
Many readers are thinking that I’ve gone off the deep end on this one because they have been brainwashed into believing that “the purpose of the insurance bet is to protect the original bet that you made on the hand against a loss to a dealer’s blackjack.” I hope I can convince you that this is not so.
Let me start by stating this fact: The insurance bet in blackjack has absolutely nothing to do with insuring your original hand from a loss. Zippo. Nada. Zero.
Yes, our friends from the casino industry would like you to believe that the insurance bet is there for your “protection,” especially when you are holding a “good” hand like a 20. After all, no one with a 20 wants to lose to a potential dealer’s blackjack. So they let players “insure” their bet so that if the dealer winds up with a blackjack, players end up with a push rather than loss. That’s very nice of them, but the plain matter-of-fact truth is that, in the long run, the insurance bet is a big loser for the player and a big winner for the casinos.
The mechanics of the insurance bet are pretty straightforward. Whenever, the dealer shows an Ace face card, he will ask the players if they want to make the insurance bet. It’s an optional and separate bet in which the player is betting that the dealer’s hole card is a 10 or picture card. The amount that the casinos let you wager on the insurance bet is equal to one-half the original bet. If the dealer ends up with a 10 or picture card in the hole, your insurance bet will win at 2-to-1 odds. If the dealer doesn’t have a 10 or picture card, the player’s insurance bet is lost.
Suppose, for example, that you make a $10 bet on your hand, you do not have a blackjack, and the dealer shows an Ace. You decide to make the insurance bet, so you place a $5 chip above your original bet, on the semicircular portion of the layout labeled “Insurance pays 2-to-1.” Let’s assume the dealer checks his hole card and it’s a 10, giving him a blackjack. Here’s what happens: You lose your original $10 bet on the hand to the dealer’s blackjack, but win $10 on the $5 insurance bet. Overall, you pushed.
Of course if you did not take the insurance bet, you would have lost your original $10 bet because the dealer’s blackjack would have beat you. This is the reason the “experts” will tell you that you are better off to push on the hand by making the insurance bet, rather than lose it all. Seems logical doesn’t it? But here are the true facts about the insurance bet:
1. Despite what the casinos would have you believe, the insurance bet is strictly a side bet that has nothing to do with increasing or decreasing your chances of winning the original bet. You are not insuring anything.
2. When you make the insurance bet, you are solely betting that the dealer’s hole card is a 10 or picture card (remember our proposition bet?).
3. Regardless of what happens to the insurance bet, the original hand will be played to completion.
4. It’s a sucker bet, worthy of no consideration if you are a smart basic strategy player.
Think about that proposition bet I described at the beginning of the article. It’s almost the same deal, except in blackjack, you see the dealer’s upcard (the Ace). Therefore, the ratio of non-10s to 10s is 35-to-16, which equates to a casino’s edge on the insurance bet of 5.9 percent in a single deck. With more decks in play, the casino’s edge on the insurance bet will increase and taper off at about 7.5 percent. Continued on...
