Floating Advantage In Online Blackjack

Few games can compete with Blackjack when it comes to heart-stopping suspense, flashing terror and intense excitement when wins are achieved. Now, apart from playing this game in a casino or at home with friends and family, you can also play it online, often with other players who might be located thousands of miles away and are only interested in taking your money and milking you dry!

Now, online blackjack is the marriage of the juicy fruits of the internet revolution with traditional blackjack. It enables players everywhere to play in an online casino with nearly anyone on the globe and for high or low stakes as desired. Playing online blackjack might feel overwhelming at first, but it quickly becomes sweetly addictive!

Now, just like any other game, online blackjack comes with its own arcane phrases which are totally meaningless to outsiders and newbies. One of this is the “Floating Advantage” and will be discussed in detail below.

A ‘Floating Advantage” Means What?

The floating advantage is actually pretty easy to understand and thankfully does not require the use of a mathematical formula or the like to make it clear. It is used in reference to the way the advantage in the game of blackjack essentially and ceaselessly shifts or floats one way or the other. That is, it moves from the house to the player, reverses itself, counter reverses itself and so on.

Each card that is left in or removed from the deck can easily have a tremendous effect on the game outcome. For this reason, blackjack is not as many believe it to be merely a game of luck, but also of strategy and skill. Thus, a capable player who keeps count of the cards seen so far will know where the floating advantage currently is and so play or bet accordingly.

All About Floating Advantage

In blackjack, counting cards are not as simple as it sounds. In actuality, it requires lots of focus and some mathematical knowledge in order to keep track of the constant stream of numbers that are appearing and disappearing.

Usually, the card counter will try to keep a tally of the low and high cards. This is then divided with the number of remaining decks so as to get a rough estimate of how valuable or otherwise the next hand will be. As can be imagined, it’s not all that exact, but can make a big difference between recording a small or massive loss, or a small or massive win.

A good understanding of Blackjack is needed to fully understand the principles of card counting and the floating advantage. Now, this understanding can be gained by watching the game either in an actual casino or streaming it on a TV. However, if you are serious as can be, the best thing would be to read up on the game.

There are quite a few excellent books about blackjack out there, among which is Blackjack Attack. This forms a collection written by the seminal and renowned Don Schlessinger, a gaming mathematician par excellence and covers topics like the floating advantage.

If you are interested in learning card counting, do keep in mind that it works much better in European Blackjack than in American Blackjack. The reason is simply that only a couple of card decks are used in European Blackjack, while American Blackjack makes use of a maximum of 8 decks.