I’ve seen some crazy strategies play out in land based casinos including a strategy called “no bust blackjack”. In this strategy, players don’t hit anything 12 or higher, regardless of what the dealer has as an up card. The theory is that as the house edge is players busting, this removes the edge. This is a VERY wrong assumption, and it’s an expensive deviation from basic strategy blackjack (that I wouldn’t recommend making).

Let’s say you have a terrible hand like 15 against a dealer’s shown 10. If you hit you have a 6/13 chance of making a hand, and a 7/13 chance of going bust. Now I agree there are some times when hitting will bust the hand and you’ll then see that if you’d stood the dealer may have busted. I know that psychologically it’s painful to feel like you’ve contributed to the losing of your hand by hitting, but trust me, it will be even more painful psychologically to lose more money through not hitting over the long term.

So how does the maths run for no bust blackjack? If you never hit 12 or over regardless of the casino’s up card, then the house edge on a typical 6 deck blackjack game is around 4%. 6-deck blackjack following perfect basic strategy has a house edge of around 0.54% – so this is up to 8 times worse!

If you’re playing say $25 a hand, at an average of 60 hands per hour, then you’ll have $1500 of turnover an hour. Under perfect basic blackjack strategy, your expected loss would be 0.54% of $1500 = $8.10 per hour. So if you played for 4 hours a day, you’d lose about $32.40 for the day. If you follow the no bust blackjack strategy, your expected loss would be 4% of $1500 = $60 per hour. So if you played for 4 hours a day, you’d lose about $240 for the day.

Which would you rather lose? $240 playing no bust blackjack rules, or $32.40 playing standard blackjack basic strategy? I think the outcome here is very clear: DON’T deviate from basic strategy, DON’T play the no bust blackjack approach – unless you want your bankroll to bust quickly.

This is why it’s so important for you to keep visiting our How to Beat the Casinos blog, as we can help to debunk myths and strange strategies that simply don’t mathematically stack up – saving you money and adding playtime to your casino entertainment. These tips work in land based casinos and in online casinos – so can be applied universally.