Engineering the Fairness of Blackjack

Le résumé fourni par la source

Blackjack is a popular card game and is a widely played casino banking game. To win the blackjack, the players aim at getting a higher total value of the cards than the dealer, while not exceeding 21. The current rule of blackjack allows the players to know one card from the dealer and draw any number of cards randomly until they choose to stop. While the dealer must continue to take cards until the total value is 17 or more. In the gambling industry, the house edge in a game such as blackjack may be high to favor the casino. Despite many previous studies on the player’s optimal strategy, little research was conducted on investigating the fairness of the blackjack. Thus, in this study, we aimed at investigating whether the current rule of blackjack is fair or not and how rule modifications impact the fairness of blackjack. Using probability theory, an optimal player’s strategy of when to stop drawing additional cards was proposed and the corresponding fairness was assessed by the player’s expected odd of winning. The optimal strategy was found to be affected by the dealer’s up card. Meanwhile, we also derived fairness when the rules are modified, such as changing the minimum total value of cards that the dealers must stop drawing cards. These theoretical derivations were verified against numerical simulations. The sensitivity of the fairness with rule modifications was discussed. Finally, we proposed a few ways of rule modifications to further improve the fairness of the blackjack.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.