Should You Get Insurance In Blackjack

1. Should You Get Insurance In Blackjack For Real
2. Should You Get Insurance In Blackjack Card Game
3. Should You Use Insurance In Blackjack
4. Should You Get Insurance In Blackjack Without
5. Should You Get Insurance In Blackjack Winnings

I’ve written a few articles in the past that included advice that said you should never take insurance when you play blackjack. I stand by this advice because, for over 90% of the players who read my articles, the advice is 100% correct.

But I also need to present the other side of the argument to give you a complete understanding of insurance. The truth is that insurance is the correct play in a few specific situations. Most of these situations only become apparent to professional card counters, and because counting pros spend most of their time beating the casinos and not reading my articles, my advice of never taking insurance is correct for everyone else.

So why am I writing an article about taking insurance?

You see, in order to become a good blackjack player, you need to understand the Insurance bet in its correct light. No matter how you may view it, when you take Insurance you're simply making a separate, entirely new bet that the dealer has a 10 in the hole – nothing more, nothing less. Most blackjack players will recommend that you never take the insurance bet because, most of the time, it’s considered to be a bad bet.

Should You Get Insurance In Blackjack For Real

As you’re getting ready to learn, there are a few situations while playing blackjack when clearly it seems that taking insurance is a good bet. The odds are good that these situations are going to surprise you because they’re not why most players take insurance.

Should You Get Insurance In Blackjack Card Game

The Argument Against Insurance

The reason why taking insurance is a bad decision most of the time can be explained using simple math. But, as you’re going to see in the next section, this same simple math is used to show in a few situations that insurance is a good bet.

When the dealer has an ace, he or she offers insurance to the payers at the table. Insurance costs half of your original wager and pays 2 to 1 when the dealer has a natural blackjack. The only way the dealer has a natural blackjack is when his or her down card is worth 10 points.

The odds of the face down card being worth 10 points are 9 to 4 against. This is a percentage chance of 30.77% that the dealer has a blackjack. The reason why the odds are 9 to 4 is because of the 13 total card ranks, four of them are worth 10 points, and the other nine aren’t. The four 10-point value ranks are the face cards and the 10s.

When you compare 9 to 4 against the payout of 2 to 1, the casino has an edge. For the bet to be fair, the chances of the dealer having a blackjack need to be the same as the payout. The payout of 2 to 1 means that the percentage chance of the dealer having a blackjack needs to be 33.33%.

In any situation where the chance the dealer has a blackjack is over 33.33%, the insurance wager is a good bet.

The problem is that most of the time, the dealer doesn’t have a 33.33% or higher chance to have a blackjack. This goes back to how you compute the dealer’s percentage, or odds, based on the normal makeup of a deck of cards.

Determining the odds or percentages based on a normal distribution of cards in the deck sounds correct, but it assumes you don’t know the value of any cards. This is the safe way to do it, especially in a shoe game because a single card doesn’t change the odds or percentages much.

But what happens if you take the knowledge of cards played and remaining available in the deck or shoe into account?

Is there a way to use this information to determine when taking insurance is a good bet?

When You Should Take Insurance

Now that you understand how the math behind the insurance bet works, let’s look at a specific example where the bet changes from bad to good.

You’re playing in a single deck blackjack game.

• On the first round of hands, you see the value of 14 cards. Only one of them is worth 10 points, so the remaining cards have 15 cards valued at 10. With 14 cards played, the deck has a total of 38 cards.
• The second round of hands is dealt, and the dealer has an ace face up. You haven’t seen the value of the other player’s cards at this point, and you have a king in your hand. Now you’ve seen the values of 17 cards when you include the two in your hand and the dealer’s ace.
• The remaining unseen cards total 35 and 14 of them are worth 10 points. This means that the odds of the dealer having a 10-point value down card are 21 to 14 or 3 to 2 against. In other words, 40% of the time the dealer is going to have a natural blackjack.

A winning insurance wager pays 2 to 1, so the odds are better than that in this hand. The 2 to 1 payout means that the chance of a dealer blackjack needs to be at least 33.3%, and in this example, the chance is 40%.

While this example is an extreme one to show when insurance is a good bet, you can also learn something from it. Now that you know that the chances of the dealer having a natural blackjack need to be 33.3% or higher, you can use this information in any single deck blackjack game. You can even use it in a double deck game if you do a good job of tracking cards.

This is much like card counting in that you don’t have to memorize every single card that’s been played. All you need to do is keep track of the ratio of total cards played to 10-point value cards. This even works in shoe games, but the truth is if you’re able to keep track of this ratio in shoe games, you should be counting cards.

How Important Is This Knowledge?

While it’s important to recognize and use every small advantage you can find, the truth is that the opportunity to take insurance with an edge is rare. If you play in single and double deck games often, it’s something that you should watch for.

But you should only concern yourself with profitable insurance opportunities after you do a few other things to lower the house edge. The first thing you should do is find blackjack games with good rules. The next thing every blackjack player should do is use basic strategy. It’s a waste of time and energy to worry about insurance before you do these two things.

Once you learn about the rules and learn how to use perfect strategy, then you can start looking for opportunities to take advantage of insurance. But even in this situation, I recommend looking for insurance opportunities as an introduction to learning more about counting cards.

When you start tracking card ratios, which is at the heart of determining when taking insurance is a good bet, you’re starting to use the same techniques card counters use. And the fact is that most popular card counting systems include a breakpoint where players start taking insurance.

If you’re looking for every possible edge at the blackjack table, understanding how insurance works and when you should take it is important. But if you don’t want to do the extra work, then stick with good rules and proper strategy. By declining insurance every time, you’re not going to make a mistake often. When you do, it’s only going to cost you a small amount over time.

It’s a much more costly mistake to take insurance when you shouldn’t than to miss an opportunity to take insurance every once in a while, when it’s the correct play.

Conclusion

Taking insurance at the blackjack table is a bad bet most of the time. If you’re a basic strategy player or a seat of your pants player and don’t count cards, your best play is to always decline blackjack insurance. But as you can see from the numbers included in this article, there are certain situations when insurance goes from a bad bet to a good one.

Once you master basic blackjack strategy, start looking for opportunities where insurance is a good bet. When you start recognizing these opportunities, it’s a good sign that you’re ready to investigate card counting. It’s a small step from understanding and using what you learned above to become a successful card counter.

Anyone who’s read a reasonably good post about basic strategy in blackjack knows that you should never take insurance. It’s a sucker bet.

But sometimes casino dealers will confuse players by offering them “even money.” That’s just another way of offering insurance to the player.

The selling point of even money in blackjack is that you’re going to win no matter what. This post explains the fallacy behind thinking that insurance (or even money) is a good idea when playing blackjack.

How Even Money Works in Blackjack

Even money works when you’ve been dealt a natural, a two-card hand that totals 21. Such a hand is also called a blackjack, and it pays off at 3:2 in most games.

There’s one catch to having a natural. If the dealer also has a blackjack, it’s a push. When the dealer has an ace showing as the face-up card, you get the opportunity to place an insurance bet. They’ll often refer to this as taking “even money.”

If you have $100 in action and agree to take even money, the dealer will pay you $100 and take your cards before looking at her hand to see if she has a blackjack, too.

This seems like a good idea. After all, if you turn down the even money, and the dealer flips over a blackjack, you lose your $100.

On the other hand, if you decline even money, you win $150 on your $100 bet. Which is the better deal?

It’s about how much you win or lose in the long run.

To really understand whether even money makes sense, you need to look at how often the dealer will win or lose and how much you’ll win on average every time.

Decisions and Consequences in This Blackjack Situation

Let’s simplify this for a minute. You have two choices. You can take even money and win $100. Or you can decline even money, winning either $150 or facing a push.

It should be obvious why declining even money makes sense, because when you push, you don’t lose any money. You just get your original bet returned to you.

How often will the dealer have a blackjack?

This varies based slightly on how many decks are in use, but for the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that the dealer will have a blackjack only 30% of the time (this is really close to the actual number). 70% of the time, you’ll win 3:2 on your bet.

Let’s play this situation out 100 times in a row.

• Player A takes even money, which means he wins $100 on all 100 hands, or $10,000.
• Player B declines even money, which means he wins $150 on 70 hands, or $10,500.

Obviously, declining even money results in more wins in the long run.

What’s the Difference Between Even Money and Insurance?

Insurance is a side bet that the dealer has a 10 as the hole card. You can only place this bet when the dealer has an ace showing face-up, and the wager for this must always be half of the original wager size. If you bet $100, your insurance bet must always be $50.

If the dealer does have a blackjack, you get paid off at 2:1 for your insurance bet, which means it pays off at $100.

You don’t need to have a blackjack to place an insurance bet. You can take insurance with any total versus the dealer’s face-up card. If you have any total other than 21, you lose your original bet against the dealer.

But since insurance pays off at 2:1, you’ll wind up breaking even on that action.

So basically, even money is just an insurance bet that you can only make when you have a blackjack. When you take even money, though, you lose your opportunity to get the 3:2 payoff.

You don’t have to put up the additional bet, because the casino has just subtracted that $50 from your payoff for your hand.

Should You Use Insurance In Blackjack

Insurance is available any time the dealer has an ace showing, but even money is only available when the dealer has an ace showing and you have a blackjack.

There’s An Exception to Every Rule

Not every blackjack game in every casino offers 3:2 payouts for a blackjack. In some games in some casinos, the payout for a blackjack is only 6:5.

You should NEVER play in such a game, because it gives the house an edge almost 1.4% higher than it would have if it paid the standard amount.

But if you ignore that advice and choose to play in such a game, the even money bet suddenly makes sense.

Here’s why. You still have the 30% probability that the casino will have a blackjack. So, now, you’re looking at winning $120 approximately 70 times out of 100, or $8400.

But if you take even money, you’ll win $100 every time for $10,000 in winnings. In a 6:5 blackjack game, even money is a GREAT bet.

The problem is that it doesn’t come up often enough to make up for what it does to the house edge. A good blackjack game might have a house edge of around 0.4% if you play with perfect basic strategy.

Convert that to 1.8%, which is what the 6:5 payout does and, suddenly, that great game becomes pretty mediocre. And that 1.8% accounts for the even money proposition, too.

Conclusion

The basic blackjack strategy should inform your every decision in blackjack, but the correct basic strategy varies based on the rules in place.

The differences between insurance and even money and when it’s appropriate to place such a bet are great examples of this.

Should You Get Insurance In Blackjack Without

Do you ever take even money when it’s available at the casino? If so, do you think this post might have changed your mind about that?

Should You Get Insurance In Blackjack Winnings

Let me know what you think in the comments.