Blackjack is a card game played at casinos and also online. This game can be played by 5-7 players with a dealer who plays for the casino. One important item required to play blackjack is a deck of cards. Blackjack is played with multiple decks and most of the games are played with two, six or eight decks. These decks of cards are shuffled and placed in a plastic box called ‘Shoe’. There are two kind of games played in blackjack – handheld games where cards are placed face down on the table and players can touch their cards during the game. In a shoe game, players are dealt cards face-up and they cannot handle their cards.

The standard playing deck is used for this game with all the cards barring the joker. You need to place a bet or wager before the dealer distributes any cards. The game starts after players buy chips from the dealer and place their bets. The dealer gives two cards face-up to each player while he gets one card face-up and the other card face-down. Cards in this game have specific values like Aces are either 1 or 11, Kings, Queens etc have 10 points and the remaining cards of the deck represent their own number with 1 being 1, 5 carrying 5 points and so on.

Your aim in this game is to reach the value of 21 or get close to 21 without going beyond and you can do this by adding cards. If your card value exceeds 21, you get busted and you lose the game. Having an ace is good as you can interchange the value between 1 and 11 to suit your requirement. That is why a hand with ace is called a soft hand while that without an ace is called a hard hand.

If the dealer’s up-card is an ace, players can safeguard them by taking insurance bet where they are required to make another wager which is half the amount of the original bet. The player stands to lose nothing if the dealer has blackjack and if the dealer doesn’t have the required 21 then the insurance bet is lost and the original game is played. Other options like doubling, splitting and surrender are available to players once the dealer has dealt the cards.

By Hollie Wilcox
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