THE RIGGEDEST GAME IN TOWN: Blackjack, to me, is like a powerful mood-enhancer. I love to sit at a friendly table, drinking inconsistently-mixed bloody mary after bloody mary, chatting with strangers and watching the numbers come out. It takes a lot at a blackjack table to make me mad, but I know one thing that would do it quickly: finding out that my table only pays 6:5 on a "blackjack," a natural 21.
Generally, I have been tolerant, if not entirely accepting, of the house-favoring modifications that Strip casinos have made to blackjack since I started gambling. I'm okay with more decks and automatic shufflers (though I avoid the latter to give myself a natural break in the gambling rhythm), since it seems to me that all they do is prevent card-counting, and I lack the higher math skills (a) to count cards; and (b) to know whether I'm even right about what they do to the odds. I am opposed to the dealer hitting the soft-17 (a 17 where an ace counts as an 11) and try to avoid it but sometimes will just suck it up. Those changes, though, are at the fringes of the game. Blackjack has very few fundamental rules, and the 3:2 payout on a blackjack is one of them. Changing this is like telling me that a committee of judges will award from zero to six points for a touchdown, depending upon degree of difficulty and artistic merit, or that batters may choose the base to which they intend to run first.
In other words, I'm more likely to get a pedicure in Vegas now than to play the 6:5 tables at the Flamingo.
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