Simplified Basic Strategy for Blackjack: Winning like a Pro without Playing like a Pro

This book is NOT for those who want to play blackjack like a pro. Playing like a pro requires a painful effort to gain knowledge and to practice a lot. I wouldn’t want that kind of pain and I bet you wouldn’t either. “No pain, no gain!” I agree. But I would say, “Just a little pain, big gain.” How? This book will show you.This book is intended for occasional casino visitors whose primary goal is having fun. If you are one of my target readers, then you must have been to casinos several times, leaned how to play blackjack, played it several times, and LOST money almost every time. Sure, having fun was your goal—not making money—so, is it good anyway? Maybe yes; but it’s better to have fun and win the game as well. It’s like the icing on the cake. Yet, if you don’t want to spend a lot of time and effort to learn to play like a pro just for the occasional pastime, then this book is for you.You must have heard of the term “basic strategy” and seen the strategy chart, which tells you the optimal action for each of the combinations of your hand and the dealer’s open card. You must also have been overwhelmed by the complexity of the so-called “basic” strategy. Sometimes you think you have memorized the strategy. The next day, however, you don’t remember what to do when you’re in front of the dealer. Forget it! In this short book, I will teach you a simplified version of the basic strategy named “Simplified Basic Strategy” or “S-Basic Strategy,” and how to apply it to actual games. This version of basic strategy consists of only ten rules, which are set forth in three rule groups. I devised this simplified version with the goal of making it simple and easy to memorize, yet keeping the difference in expected gain, with respect to the original version, negligible. Therefore, by playing S-Basic Strategy, you can expect almost the same result as you can get by playing basic strategy. Actually, you can expect a better result because you can play more consistently with fewer mistakes. The simplification is based on rigorous mathematics—more specifically, probability theory—and a lot of computer simulations, although I will explain it intuitively without mathematics.Enjoy! This book is also NOT for those who want to learn how to play blackjack. There are already so many books and web sites on that topic. My target readers do not need a heavy volume with unnecessary information.