Playing blackjack, whether online or in a real casino, can be great fun and because of the low house edge – effectively the casino’s profit margin – it gives the player a great chance to make a profit. However, as with all gambling, be it playing blackjack, betting on the NBA or any other sport or casino game, a staking plan is an essential route to success.
A staking plan is a method of managing your money in order to give yourself the best chance of success, be that to guarantee a certain length of time at the table, to try to make a profit or to clear the wagering requirements of an online casino bonus. Your staking plan should change according to what your goal is and here we look at the three aims stated above.
Prolonging Table Time
If you have a fixed budget and want to make sure it lasts for a certain period of time, a staking plan for blackjack is crucial. Whatever staking plan you adopt, dividing your total budget into base units is essential. For example, if you want to play for a long time you may decide that betting 5% of your total funds on any one hand is sensible. If your total account balance is $500 that would mean betting $25 per hand (doubling and splitting would take that to more but as long as you do that only when basic strategy dictates, that’s fine). By doing this your risk of ruin – of going bust – is greatly reduced, although a more complex version of this blackjack strategy includes assessing how many hands per hour you would expect to play.
Making a Profit
A staking plan cannot change the casino’s advantage, merely alter the standard deviation and so in truth there is no staking plan that will guarantee a profit, despite what many sites may claim when they try to sell you their own staking plan.
Completing Bonus Wagering
Many bonuses are configured such that allowing for the house edge there is a small profit to be made by the player, based on expected returns. However, in order to reduce the risk of variance causing you to go bust, the smallest stakes possible are needed, which means completing the wagering may take many, many hours. One way around this is to play high stakes early on in an attempt to double, triple (or more) your stake, before switching to smaller (but larger than you would otherwise be able to had you not increased the bonus first) stakes to “grind” out the blackjack bonus.