Blackjack Practice Like anything else in life you need to practice to become better. Musicians do it. Artists do it. Blackjack players should do it to. How does one practice blackjack? It’s easy and you can do it all by yourself. Here are some blackjack practice drills that will improve your skills in all the important blackjack strategies. 1. Basic Strategy Deal a card face up to represent the dealer’s up card – begin with a 2 card of any suit. Next, deal yourself two cards. Now proceed to play the hand and hit, stand, split and double down. Start by guessing the correct play first then check the basic strategy chart against your decision. Deal another new hand against the dealer’s 2. Continue dealing and playing against the dealer’s two until you have gone through the entire deck. Now change the dealer’s up card to a 3 and play through the entire deck as before. Continue this changing the dealer’s up card until you have played against every possible dealer up card. 2. More Basic Strategy Deal yourself two cards for your hand – a pair of any number such as a pair of sixes. Deal a card face up for the dealer’s up card. Now decide whether to split or not. Deal another face up card to represent a different dealer’s up card. Continue through the deck revealing a different up card each time. You will be able to do this fifty times with a standard deck of cards. Continue practicing using other difficult player hands. 3. Playing Strategy Be the dealer and deal three hands all face up including the dealer’s up card. Use basic strategy to play each hand. Leave the dealer’s hand. This drill is to practice your own basic strategy playing skills. 4. Card Counting When card counting, you will want to be familiar with the value of each card. This drill uses the Hi-opt I counting system, but it will work with any card counting system you choose. You will subtract one for every face card to ten card and add one for every 3, 4, 5 and 6 card. You can ignore neutral cards such as ace, 2, 7, 8 and 9. Reveal one card at a time an call its value. If you see a high card, call it “minus-one”. If you see a low card, call it “plus one”. A neutral card is zero. Continue practicing the drill until you are able to recognize the value of each card. 5. The Running Count This drill is the same as the Card Counting drill except now you keep a running count. Start the count with zero and add or subtract one as you see each card. When the last card is revealed you count should end with zero. If it isn’t, you have made a mistake. When counting the deck, say the count to yourself. If you see a neutral card, repeat the running count from the last card. 6. Faster, Faster When you are mentally keeping track of a card count you can speed things up a bit by saying one for plus one and mi-one for minus one. You are only saying one syllable not two to indicate the word minus. You can also do this with the word zero. Say z instead of zero. You will find your counting speed increases by doing this. 7. Scanning The Deck To further increase your counting speed, hold a deck face up in your left hand and push cards off the top of the deck from left to right. To start, keep count in combinations of two cards. As you improve try scanning three, four and five card combinations. Speed is important regardless of the size of the deck.

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