The percentages of the time that you will win or lose for each playing option are (assumes a six-deck game): BLACKJACK SURRENDER STRATEGY: INSIDE THE NUMBERS Strategy You have three choices on how to play the hand: hit, stand, or surrender. This is the worst blackjack hand that you can get when you are playing. Suppose you are dealt a 10 and 6 and the dealer’s upcard is a ten. The latter means that statistically if playing a hand has less than a 25% chance of winning (and consequently greater than 75% of losing), you will save money in the long run by surrendering the hand instead. Therefore, it makes sense to surrender only those hands when your expected loss from playing the hand to a conclusion is greater than 50% (i.e., when your chances of winning are less than one out of four hands). You know that when you surrender a hand you will lose 50% (or half) of your wager.

WHAT IS SURRENDER IN BLACKJACK?īefore I show you the surrender playing strategy, it’s important that you understand the math behind surrender. But as you will see shortly, surrender can be a smart play if you know which hands to surrender.

Most players disdain the surrender option because they much prefer to try to “win their hands,” rather than wimp out and surrender them. If you decide to surrender, the dealer will remove half of your bet and then scoop up your initial two cards and place them in the discard tray. For the uninitiated, blackjack surrender works like this.Īfter comparing your initial two-card hand against the dealer’s upcard, if you think your chances of winning the hand are not very good, you can forfeit playing your hand and surrender (or give up) half of the amount of your wager. One of the playing decisions available to land-based and online blackjack players in some (but not all) casinos is to surrender their hand.

Should you surrender in blackjack