Blackjack Insurance Online Casino – is a simple game with minimal rules: you wager against the dealer and try not to score above or under 21. That’s it. That is until casinos tried to spice the game up with side bets and injected a (unnecessary) paradox into the action. One such conundrum is blackjack insurance.
We’ve already intimated that this is a bad play, but if you want to understand more about insurance in blackjack, why you should avoid it in most scenarios, and what the blackjack insurance odds are, stick with us.
What Is Blackjack Insurance Online Casino?
The most popular optional side bet in blackjack is blackjack insurance, which allows you to protect yourself from the dealer’s blackjack when they hold an ace as the upcard.
When placing the insurance bet, you are simply wagering that the dealer’s second card will be a 10 or a picture card, resulting in 21. You win if the dealer gets a blackjack and get paid at 2:1 odds.
If their card is not a ten-value card, you lose your insurance bet.
What Are the Odds and the Math Behind Blackjack Insurance?
Let’s break down the arithmetic behind the insurance blackjack wager so you can make a more informed choice.
Let’s imagine you are playing blackjack online with a single deck and a $2 insurance bet; in this situation, the ratio of ten-value cards to non-tens is 16 (four tens, four jacks, four queens, and four kings) to 36.
Assume for the moment that the dealer asks if you would like to place the insurance bet while holding an ace as the upcard. If we ignore the makeup of your hand, the ratio of non-ten-value cards to ten-value cards is now 35 to 16. Stated differently:
- You lose $70 (the total number of times the dealer doesn’t have a ten-value card) if you make the $2 insurance wager 35 times.
- If you place the identical stake 16 times and the dealer has a ten in the hole, you will win $64 (assumed payout of 2:1).
You would have a $6 net loss if you always chose insurance (you would have lost $70 against $64 in wins). The house edge, or 5.9%, is what we obtain when we divide the $6 in profits by the $102 investment to determine the disadvantage.
The payback odds for blackjack insurance, as you can see, are not as high as the actual odds of getting a ten-value card; if they were, the house would win slightly more than $4 for each correct wager. However, it doesn’t, which indicates that the odds are stacked in favor of the casino.
Is Your Hand Covered by Insurance?
The insurance bet is not specifically discouraged by blackjack regulations. But if any of the following scenarios sound familiar to you, use basic algebra and common sense to figure out what to do next:
