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“Did you come here to gamble, or just to give your money to the house?” grunted the surly old loser next to me, after I surrendered the first three hands I received. I just shook my head in disgust and didn’t bother pointing out to him that while I had lost a bet and a half, he had lost his last three wagers entirely. “Surrender is only for suckers, you know,” he continued. “Do you think the casinos would offer such a thing if it weren’t to their advantage?”
Even more beneficial to the player than knowing when to take insurance, surrender is the most misunderstood and least used of the commonly available options. When Adantic City opened its first casino in May of 1978, its “early” surrendering policy led some knowledgeable players to dub it “the Candy Store.” It didn’t take the casinos long to realize how beneficial the early surrender was for the players, and in September 1981 they all downgraded “early” to “late” surrender, i.e., offering the surrender option only after the dealer is sure that she has no blackjack. In those intervening years, however, millions of dollars that would otherwise have been lost to the casinos were “surrendered” back to intelligent players.
Taking advantage of correct surrendering opportunities benefits the card-counting player much more than the stricuy BS player. While surrendering 15 versus T, and 16 versus 9, T, or A provides the BS practitioner with a slight gain over hitting, knowing the proper MBS surrendering indices and acting upon them can increase a counter’s win-rate by up to half a percentage point.