Blackjack Etiquette – Don’t let bad players at your table make you angry
We’ve all been there. You’re playing blackjack and some idiot at the table keep making idiotic decisions. And sometimes those decisions negatively affect your hand. If you’re betting big dollars, that can really hurt.
More often than not, someone at the table will get really pissed off at the novice player, and that often leads to silly shouting matches.
Avoid being the angry player at all costs.
This scene from the television show “Entourage” offers a good example of why you shouldn’t get angry.
Vince and the gang head to Las Vegas when Vince is offered $100,000 to host a party. Ari comes along with them, and he and Vince agree to split winnings and losses. Vince loves blackjack and has a knack for it. Plus he doesn’t get frazzled easily, even when he loses the $100,000 and more. Ari is a maniac, so he’s going cray watching Vince try to make a comeback.
Things come to a head when Vince gets a pair of eights. He splits, get another eight, splits again, and then gets a three, which leads him to double down. The hand is worth over $300,000.
Meanwhile, the idiot player at the end of the table decides to split kings. Naturally, Ari freaks out and yells at him, while the guys pulls two tens, which easily could have been the bust cards for the deal, who had a three showing.
But the dealer flops over an eight, and would have had 21 had the idiot not split his tens. Instead, the dealer draws another three instead, before pulling another ten to bust.
The lesson is simple. The idiots, can just as easily help your hand as they can hurt your hand. You’ll always remember the hands where they hurt you, but they can help as well. It’s all random, so don’t let it bother you.
Which leads to the next lesson. Getting angry is never helpful when you’re gambling. You want to strip out your emotions, not get distracted by them.
Just watch lunatic Ari in this clip. Of course the guy is a caricature of an emotional gambler, but you never want to be anything close to that.