Blackjack Tips

Other than counting cards, the veterans may be able to tell stories about other ways of beating the system.

“Tells” is a gambler’s term for physical manifestations of what is going on inside a person’s head. A fancier term for it is “kinesics” or “body language.” For example, poker players wear dark glasses to hide their pupils from their competitors, since dilation is an involuntary reaction to excitement or stress. In blackjack, there are no other players to compete against, and the dealer must act according to certain rules. But there are two circumstances in which a “tell” might be legible. One is if the dealer checks his or her hole card for blackjack (when a ten or an ace is showing). If this happens, it may be possible to read whether there is an ace ten or ace underneath, and insure accordingly. Rarely, a dealer might purposefully “tell” that status somehow, even though it is, obviously, not permitted by the casino. This will be one of the dividends of generous toking. Increasingly dealers do not check for blackjack under a ten, so this approach is of even less value than before. No one actually ever says whether a dealer had a “tell,” if they are at all smart, so it is even hard to document whether there is any practical application for it.

The other context in which a “tell” might be useful deals with the next card to be drawn. F the dealing is not from a shoe, the dealer may sometimes get a glance at it and might be inclined through body language to communicate something. Very rarely does a person at eye level ever have a glimpse of either the next card or the bottom card of the deck. It is legal, of course, to use the information if you received it without cheating. Reading what you think may be body language is not going too far.

Warps is also, unhappily, a legend headed to the junk heap of history. When dealers regularly checked under tens for an ace, the ten would be bent up on one end, creating a slight curvature of the card towards the face side. If placed face down, the card would “cup” a little off a flat surface. This is also called a “warp.” Other cards, the hole cards under the ten, could also show warps, towards the back side, i.e., cupping away from the face, but less so, as there are more non-tens than tens in a deck, so the bending would occur less often to check the card. Which way an ace would warp, if at all, would depend on whether the dealer checked under aces. If so, they would display the same warps as tens.

The two problems with reading warps are first, the warp is so subtle that it is possible to talk oneself into seeing something that is not there or reading the card totally wrong. In such circumstances, reading warps is less accurate than counting or even just using basic strategy. The other problem is that few dealers check the hole card anymore until after everyone else has played the hand.

In short, the best strategy is simply to learn basic strategy extremely well and stick to it in a disciplined way; be good to the dealer, both in terms of professional respect and in tipping practices; learn to count cards, if desired, but be mindful of all the aspects of doing it well, ranging from being a good actor, to memorizing strategy options, to doing two things at once while pretending not to be doing anything at all.