BlackJack

Mitch Hedberg an avid Blackjack player and a man with the funny bone leaves his game on a note saying “I like to play Blackjack. I’m not addicted to gambling. I’m addicted to sitting in a semi-circle”. If what he says is true than it appears like a lot of people like sitting in that particular way because the Blackjack game is one of the most widely played casino banking game in the world and generates money like no other casino game does.

The game is also known as the Pontoon and is commonly called Twenty-One or the Vingt-et-un in French. The popularity of the game depends on the variations that it offers at different casinos. The game whose precursor was the “twenty-one” has its origins traced back to literature. The first instance of the Blackjack being played by people is in a book by Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote. The players play the game of “veintiuna” (Spanish for twenty one) and the deal is to reach a score of twenty one points without busting while the players target taking their Ace values to 1 or 11. These simple sets of rules have been modified in later day versions of the game but essentially define how the game is played.

The origin of the Blackjack in the United States is also remarkable. Since the Twenty-One was introduced to the land of opportunities it had been struggling to get popular with the masses. Like the Americans always add their distinct flavor to what they adopt, they made the Twenty One into the modern day version of the very popular Blackjack.

There are specific rules that one needs to follow when one plays the Blackjack against a casino. In a typical game of Casino Blackjack the dealer of the Blackjack game faces a set of one to seven players standing behind what is famously known as the kidney shaped table. Each player individually gets a chance to play his hand against the dealer. On receiving his initial hand of two cards after placing a bet on the betting box, the player has to craft his way through to getting a higher card total than the dealer. The only thing to remember is that one cannot go over 21 or else the player is busted. The game is between the player and the dealer and either the player or the dealer is busted by the end of the game of Blackjack.

When the cards are dealt they are either put across from one or two hand-held decks or else from a shuffling machine. It hardly matters as to whether the cards are dealt face up or face down; the dealer always has to follow a set of rules that are prearranged.

In a game of Blackjack the highest possible hand that one can deal is a “natural”. A player who has dealt in the blackjack automatically becomes a winner. In case the dealer also gets a blackjack the hand is then called a “push”, the Blackjack term for a tie. The intricacies of the game are many and the game always gives an upper hand to the player who has spent time watching the proceedings of the game and then decided to squabble in the intricacies of the game.