These small cards are exactly what you need to make a pat hand when you hit your 16. The reason you should stand on a 16 when your hand contains three or more cards is because your hand contains one (or more) small-value cards that are no longer available in the pack of unplayed cards. All three hands total 16, but with a three-card 16, you are better off standing, whereas with the two-card 16, you should hit. It turns out there is a difference between a 16 made up of two cards, such as 10-6 and 9-7, and one made up of three cards, such as 4-5-7.

However, what the T-D basic strategy doesn’t consider is the makeup of the hand. If I asked you how you would play the following hands against a dealer’s 10 upcard what would be your answer? Assume surrender is not offered if surrender is offered, you should surrender all two-card hard 16s against a dealer’s 10 upcard except 8-8.Īccording to the (T-D) strategy charts and tables in Chapter 3, you would hit the first three hands and split the 8s. However, what follows are a few composition-dependent plays that you can readily learn and use to make you a tougher player. More recently, additional information on C-D basic strategy can be found in the book Blackjack Attack: Playing the Pros’ Way by Don Schlesinger The book Blackjack Bluebook II by Fred Renzey and Don Schlesinger’s commercially available Ultimate Blackjack Strategy Cards.ĭeveloping a strategy chart or table with all of the possible composition-dependent strategies would be pages long and virtually impossible for an average player to learn. There is nothing “wrong” with this basic strategy however, you can gain extra precision (i.e., slightly lower house edge) if you consider the composition of the cards in your hand, known as Composition-Dependent or C-D basic strategy.Īctually, C-D basic strategy has been around for a long time, having first been proposed in 1979 in the classic book The Theory of Blackjack by the late blackjack mathematician Peter A. The latter is also more commonly referred to as the traditional basic playing strategy. The basic strategy presented in Chapter 3 considered just the total of all the cards in your hand, without any consideration of the individual cards that comprise the total, known as Total-Dependent or T-D basic strategy.

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