Third basemen sometime draw the ire of know-it-alls who think that player’s job is to bust the dealer.
The first-round two-deck example above is one where the third baseman made a move old school players using basic strategy would find odd. And seeing the dealer NOT bust, a know-it-all might shout: “You took the dealer’s card!”
In fact, it’s the right move here. Yet old school methods do not typically adjust properly to what cards have been dealt, to give you the right odds of making any particular move.
We can look at this from any number of standpoints to prove that 13 is a loser if not improved.
Let’s start with the normal proportion of 10s, in a balanced (undealt) deck: 31 percent. This is the number old schoolers assume is available when designing their one-size-fits-all basic strategy.
Yet what is the proportion of 10s in the undealt cards at the time the third baseman’s turn arrives? About 26 percent. (You don’t have to do this kind of calculation as a player. Just making a point.) So the dealer is less likely to bust purely due to this fact.
And what is the proportion of high to low cards on the table? You can either do this visually or exactly. My all-inclusive card counting method for beginners — used for betting NOT (like the old school methods) but for card moves — shows the count to be -11. (The all-inclusive count counts 2s through 7s as +1 each and 8s through 10s as -1 each.) So the undealt cards are skewed heavily toward low cards. That is, low cards account for a much larger percentage of the undealt cards than normal.
In a 52-card deck the low cards (2s through 7s) account for 48 percent of the cards. After the first two cards were dealt in the example above, the low cards accounted for 52 percent of the undealt cards (again, not a number you’d have to calculate to play the game).
So low cards are probable at the dealer’s turn. When low cards are due when the dealer has a low up card, the dealer’s busting rate goes way down. The 3 normally busts 35 percent of the time, but here it’s much lower.
Making it even lower is the fact that no aces had been dealt before the dealer’s turn. Aces give the dealer the edge, lowering the dealer’s busting rate dramatically.
The likelihood of the dealer NOT busting is roughly in the 20-percentile range, that of the normal dealer 10. You don’t stand on a 13 versus the normative dealer’s 10.
Finally, the truth is that a player’s job is to play his or her cards in the way that best suits their fortunes whether or not they sit in the third base seat.
The third baseman played correctly. The dealer did not bust NOT because he or she “took the dealer’s (bust) card” but because the dealer had a 4:1 likelihood of not busting.
Richard Harvey is a world renowned blackjack researcher and innovator, expert player, blackjack coach and professor, columnist and bestselling author of Blackjack The SMART Way (the NEW Gold Edition), Cutting Edge Blackjack (the NEW Third Edition), NEW Ways To Win MORE at Blackjack and the audio book Richard Harvey’s Blackjack PowerPrep Session. Have blackjack questions? Send them to rharvey2121@netscape.net. For more info see http://www.blackjacktoday.com.
