beat the dealer

Blackjack is the only game offered by casinos, where it is proven that players can beat the dealer on the long term. Many books and articles have been published about this theme, however most of them are written to make You lose money. The only way of having a moderate advantage over the dealer is to carefully analyze the remaining cards in the shoe, placing variable bets and deciding when to stay or buy, double or split. How this analysis works is described in this document. It is assumed that the reader of this document is familiar with the rules of Blackjack and that he has a basic understanding in probability calculation and terminology. A program to calculate the best strategy can be downloaded from this site, so that everybody can verify results and test it against their preferred counting method. Beat the dealer without busting. You bust when your cards total to more than 21 and you lose automatically. The winner is whoever has closest to a total of 21. You reach 21 by adding up the values of the cards.
The blackjack table seats about 6 players. Either six or eight decks of cards are used and are shuffled together by the dealer and placed in a card dispensing box called 'Shoe'.
Before receiving any cards players must place a wager. Then the players are dealt two cards face up. The dealer gets one face up, one face down. Each player in turn either stays or takes more cards to try and get closer to 21 without busting. Players who do not bust wait for the dealer's turn. When all the players are done, the dealer turns up the down card. By rule, on counts of 17 or higher the dealer must stay; on counts of 16 or lower the dealer must draw.