10 reasons why Spanish 21 is more beatable than Blackjack
If you play the Spanish 21 games with low house edges (and they are all over the northeast, Canada, and the Pacific northwest)
e.g. S17 Spanish 21 (6-deck house edge 0.37%) or H17 with redoubling Spanish 21 (6-deck house edge 0.42%), you make a lot more money than if you play Blackjack. Why?
1. Even in the H17 game, the Ace EOR is -0.73. It's even higher in the S17 game. The Ace is so much more valuable than in Blackjack because naturals ALWAYS get paid 3:2, and you can split Aces to 4 hands, and draw and double down on them.
2. To top it off, this Ace of heightened value occurs more frequently than in Blackjack (1/12 instead of 1/13).
3. Indices are much more powerful than in Blackjack, where there is little scope for play variation. (e.g., for stiff hands, which are the most common, what can you do as the count goes up: vary your play between hitting 12 vs 2,3 and standing? Wow. Powerful stuff (not). In Spanish 21, the indices win rate is 2.15 times the BS win rate, on average. There is HUGE scope for play variation as the count goes up.
4. For each increment of +1 in the Hi-Lo true count, the increase in the natural proportion (i.e. the gradient) is 17% higher in Spanish 21 than Blackjack, because of the Ace-richness.
5. For each increment of +1 in the Hi-Lo true count, the SP21 advantage increases by an average of 0.65% (when using all indices). Isn't BJ around 0.5%? And Aces are 1/4 of the money cards rather than 1/5.
6. SP21 penetration is up to 90% in some venues. On average, SP21 pen is much better than BJ pen. You would all know that win rate (90% pen) is around 6 times the win rate at 65% pen, not even including the extra shuffle time.
7. Dealers regularly give early surrender because they have no idea what they are doing.
8. I don't use one, but a 2-level count would be even better. The KatCount, 1 2 2 2 1 0 0 0 -1 -2 (from 2 through Ace) has a correlation coefficient (between EORS) of 0.983. Significantly higher than the corr coeff for the Revere Point Count for Blackjack (which is 0.976).
9. There is hardly any heat, so you can bet optimally. You get table conditions that haven't been seen in Blackjack for 40 years.
10. You can double down on any number of cards. As the count increases, we all know that we win more doubles. In SP21, we get even more winning doubles than in Blackjack, as the count goes up.
A quote from Anthony Curtis:
"As is often the case in gambling, cursory investigation, erroneous assumptions, and limited information can lead to missed
opportunities. Such has been the case with Spanish 21."