Taking Advantage of Surrender

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Taking Advantage of Surrender

I can well remember the good ol' days in Atlantic City when casino gaming first began there. The one casino which was open at the time (Resorts International) had to offer a Blackjack game where the rules were established by the Casino Control Commission and that included a weird rule called 'surrender'. At least we thought it was weird until we figured out what a huge advantage it gave to the player who used it correctly.

Most players dubbed surrender as a sucker bet. Once at a table, some other player summed it all up when he declared: "Surrendering is nuts! Why give up half your bet when you could just as easily win the hand?" To a degree, he was right. What I mean by that is it's true that a player could win or lose any one given hand, but he didn't carry the thought far enough. If you play thousands of hands, giving up 50% of the bet on some of them is actually the cheaper alternative to playing it out.

For those of you who aren't familiar with surrender, it's a player option which some casinos offer. When allowed, you may elect to give up half the amount you've bet rather than play out the hand. For the mathematically inclined, you can see that for those hands where your expectation is to lose more than 50% of the time, surrender is a good deal. There are two types of surrender early and late. Those terms refer to whether or not a dealer checks to see if s/he has a blackjack (when an Ace or 10 is showing) before you may make the surrender decision. In A.C., the type of surrender was 'early' which meant that you could give up half your bet before the dealer knew if s/he had a 'natural'. That came about simply because state regulations didn't allow 'peeking', so a dealer didn't know what his hand was until all the players had made their playing decisions.

These days, the most common form of surrender is the 'late' version where the dealer checks for a natural and, if s/he doesn't have it, then you may surrender. This is worth a lot less, since if the dealer does have a natural, s/he takes your bet before you can surrender. But, in spite of that restriction, surrender can still be of some value to you, if you use it properly.

Let me show you an example; assume a 6-deck game with double after split allowed and the dealer must stand on A-6. If I have a hand of 9, 7 and the dealer is showing a 10, my 'expectation' is to lose 53.7% of all the money I bet in that situation. If I surrender, I'll lose 50% of all the money bet in that situation. A modest improvement, but better nonetheless.

So this makes figuring the basic strategy for surrender very simple If the expectation is to lose more than 50%, surrender. For a multi-deck game, here are the rules

Player's hand of 9,7 or 10, 6:

Surrender against a dealer's
9, 10, Ace

Player's hand of 8, 8:

Surrender against a dealer's 10 (Though it's virtually a toss-up; split if DAS is allowed.)

Player's hand of 15:

Surrender against a dealer's 10 (Note If the dealer hits A-6, surrender against an Ace, also.)

Late surrender adds to the player's edge by .modest .1%, but I like it when I have a big bet out there and I get a 10 for my first card, as expected, and then get the last 6 in the deck as my next card. Who hasn't done that before?

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