Misguided Advice on Blackjack

Finally, there is one piece of advice most blackjack Basic Strategy charts (including ours) don’t cover:

Never surrender. This isn’t some over-zealous call to arms, but an easy way to remember that, no matter what, the Surrender rule offered at some blackjack tables is not for you. The reason for this is that the rule itself is a con: When a player surrenders he checks his initial hand, then forfeits half his bet in order to fold. Meanwhile, if he doesn’t surrender he has about a 25 percent chance of losing. So in payout terms playing normally will only lose you 25 cents on the dollar sometimes; whereas surrendering will lose you 50 cents on the dollar every time. Simply put, you’d lose twice as much as you have to – and that, children, may very well be the dumbest idea we’ve heard yet.

I'm not math teacher, but im pretty sure if you had a 16 and dealer is showing a 10. Your chances of losing are more than 25%


Source of Information

It looks to me like something they came up with in an attempt to get better Google rankings.

Personally, I don't trust anything found on these cookie-cutter sites that promote rogue online casinos, the above site being a prime example. Rarely do they actually say anything, and when they do, it is usually either nonsense (like the above site), or it is copied from the real deal.

The name of the site, "Ace Hoyle", does seem like an appropriate pun though.

I always thought it was good to surrender if you get a bustable hand and a dealer is showing a 10 and you have a true count of 3+

Quote: Hollywood06

I'm not math teacher, but im pretty sure if you had a 16 and dealer is showing a 10. Your chances of losing are more than 25%


Source of Information

Your chances of losing holding a 16 against a dealer 10 are about 60% whether you draw a card or not. Your chances of losing by surrendering under the same conditions are 50%. Therefore you will lose 50 cents on every dollar bet by surrendering and lose about 60 cents on every dollar bet by standing or hitting. Surrendering is the proper move if you do not know the count and are only playing BS

Quote: Hollywood06

I'm not math teacher, but im pretty sure if you had a 16 and dealer is showing a 10. Your chances of losing are more than 25%

Sounds like you're saying you don't believe the 'never surrender' rule.


I look at it this way: If the source was correct and surrendering was a bad idea, then surrender would be available at every table. There's gotta be a reason the casinos don't offer it more than they do.

Personally, I have a very hard time hitting a 16. But if I'm at table that offers surrender, I do it - if I remember! Sigh, I often forget to ask...

Just like the idiots who don't hit a 16 against a 7 and stay on a 12 against a 2, you have the crowd that say "never surrender". And I get glared at when I ask to surrender, especially if the next card out of the shoe is a non-bust card (and people leave the table when the card for the dealer is a card that makes their hand), but the rule is there for you to take advantage of. And when you have a non-splittable 16 against a 10, the surrender is your friend... on a 10 dollar table, it'll save you about 40 cents. Given that you get this combination of 10-6 or 9-7 against a 10 on about 1.82% of hands, you'll save a big $.73/hour (at 100 hands / hour), which just about covers tips.

In my experience, whenever you have to write that many words to explain such a simple concept... it's wrong.

Quote: boymimbo

a big $.73/hour (at 100 hands / hour), which just about covers tips.

I hope you're kidding :) (I thought I was a cheap tipper!)

That site obviously stole my basic strategy chart. I know you can find it in lots of sources, but they use the Ds and Dh notation, which I came up with on my own. Yet another worthless site about gambling, which is precisely what I started mine in 1997.

I don't have exact probabilities of hitting, standing, and pushing for any given hand, but I can assure you in plays where I say to surrender that pr(win)-pr(loss)<-0.5. If the decision is between standing on 16 against a 10 and surrender, the probability of winning IS less than 25%. My blackjack appendix 2 shows the probability of the dealer busing with a 10 up, the only way to win by standing, is 23.0239%. Hitting is only a hair better, not enough to get over -0.5 expected value.

In addition to all of his other bad blackjack advice, John Scarne once claimed that a player should never surrender, as it adds x% (I forget what the exact number was) to the house edge. To arrive at this number he must have tacitly assumed that the player would surrender all stiffs or something similar. Of course, one could just as easily argue that one should never double down bcause it adds y% to the house edge (on the assumption that the player doubles on all non-stiffs).