How Rules Affect Player Advantage
According to proper BS, playing in two different casinos does not provide the player with identical advantages unless the house rules in both places are exactly the same. Obviously, all other factors being equal, you will not win as much playing in a game with very restrictive rules as in one with more liberal options. The following list outlines a few common rule variations and their advantage or disadvantage to the player in percent:
1. Doubling on any number of cards, +.62%
2. Doubling on any three cards, + .2%
3. Doubling allowed after splitting, + .1%
4. Drawing any number of cards to split Aces, + .14%
5. Surrender in shoe games, + .1%
6. Six-card bonus (total of 21 or less), + .17
7. No doubling on 9s or 10s, .7%
8. Dealer hits soft 17s, - .2%
9. No soft doubling allowed, .14%
10. No resplitting of pairs, - .05%
11. No hole card (charity and Europe), .13%
For example, playing at the Vegas Club, which advertises “The Most Liberal ‘21′ Rules in the world,” in order to calculate your BS playing gain you would add the percentages from numbers 1,3,5, and 6 (plus perhaps 0.1 for resplitting Aces no specific percentage is given for this beneficial variation) for a total of +1.09%, but subtract number 8. Therefore, your overall BS advantage expectation when playing at Vegas Club would be approximately + .9% (less other minor variables such as the number of decks used, etc.), which means that even without counting cards you would still have some odds with you, slight as they may be.
