jimbiggs said:
With blackjacks paying even money, I don't see how the house edge could be that small. Anybody know the actual house edge?
I believe the Wiz has it right. BJ Switch is a game I play whenever I find it. A lot of the northern CA Indian joints have installed a table of it. Had a fun experience at one: played two shoes and basically emptied out the tray. Left the table to play some slots for cover and a break, when I turned back around the dealer was gone and the table locked up. They barely had enough money in the cashier's cage to cash me out. I got the hell out of that place quickly.
Counterintuitively, if BJS is dealt with European No hole card rules it helps the player. That is because the player gets a chance to switch to a natural before the dealer checks for BJ. The Playtech online casinos offer BJS, and they got piggy and were dealing it ENHC for the longest time. This gave a house edge of only 0.08%. But Playtech also offers a cashable comp of 0.1% of all action, so you ended up with a
player edge of 0.02% with straight play. They have since changed this.
Normally I use RPC but when playing BJS I use the balanced Zen count, because the devalued ace more accurately represents the value of the ace in this even-money-for-naturals game. Contrary to what other sites tell you, use the same playing strategy you would use for regular BJ. I don't have a good set of numbers for advantage as a function of true count, so I kind of wing it.