Aggressive Play in Surrender Blackjack

Surrender Blackjack, not to be confused with the similarly-named Blackjack Surrender, is a game that uses both the early surrender rule and the European no peek rule. As a result, you can get yourself into some good opportunities to win a lot of money if you can find a game with other favorable rules since casinos usually mess up when they offer this game, and you can frequently find games that have a payout rate in the range of 100.5 to 100.7 percent to give you a good advantage against the house when it’s spread.

To take advantage of this, however, you have to be a lot more aggressive with your surrendering than normal. Usually you have to be conservative with it because doing it too much will absolutely destroy your payout rate. However, against aces especially (and also tens), there are more opportunities to correctly surrender. The reason for this is that the dealer can have blackjack when it’s your turn to act, so his average holding is a lot stronger. Along these lines, you’re correct to surrender more often. We’re going to look at exactly when those cases are here.

With a hard total, you’re going to surrender against an ace if you have a seven or lower. These low hands are so hard to turn into anything reasonable that they aren’t worth even playing against an ace. Then there are the totals eight through 11 that are strong enough to hit but not double or surrender. Once you have hard totals from 12 to 17 (yes, including 17), you should surrender instead of trying to play. It’s strange to surrender on a 17, but that’s what’s called for in this game. After that, you’ll just stand with an 18 or higher.

When it comes to dealing with tens, you’re only going to surrender with the three weakest hard hands. Those are hard totals of 14 through 16. In some games you’ll surrender with a hard 16 against a nine, but that’s not the case in Surrender Blackjack, and you have to remember why. The key to it is that the nines aren’t affected by the strength differential that comes with the European no peek rule. Overall, there is a lot of aggression with the surrender option in this game that you wouldn’t normally see, and it all comes down to the combination of the early surrender and no peek rules.