Blackjack is a card game played between the player and the dealer. It is played with one or more 52-card decks. Number cards count as their number, the jack, queen and king (“face cards”) count as 10, and aces can count as either 1 or 11 (depending on whether counting it as 10 would make the hand over 21). The object of the game is to get a hand total higher than the dealer’s without exceeding 21, and to beat the dealer by getting a higher value card than the dealer. In some casinos, players may take “insurance,” a side bet that the dealer has a blackjack, which pays 2 to 1.

Once all bets have been placed, the dealer will deal each player two cards face up. The players then decide whether to stand (keep their current hand) or ask for more cards (hit). If a player has a pair of aces or any other pair, they can also double down, which means they make a second wager equal to the amount of their first bet. The dealer then draws additional cards until he or she stands or busts.

In order to become a blackjack dealer, you must complete a training program offered by the casino or gaming establishment where you wish to work. This training will typically cover a variety of topics including the rules of the game, customer service and gaming regulations. In addition to receiving a blackjack dealer training certificate, some casinos may require you to pass a background check before hiring you.

To begin, the dealer will place a solid red “cut card” in the deck to mark where the cards should be separated during the cut. The dealer then separates the cards into two stacks, one of which is the shuffled deck and the other is the fresh deck. The shuffled deck is used for the subsequent rounds of the game.

The seasoned blackjack players know that the house edge of the game is much lower than most other casino games and can be mitigated by using basic strategy. The Everything Blackjack Strategy Book, by Tom Hagen and Sonia Weiss, provides an in-depth look at the game’s rules and key terms.

The authors’ research aims to examine the effects of unjustified confidence in blackjack on a range of psychological and behavioral consequences by assessing the interrelationships between them. The choice of blackjack as the research domain is suitable for this purpose because it is a simple, real-world game that can be studied with great detail. All studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by Wake Forest Institutional Review Board and the participants provided written informed consent. The raw data of this study will be made available upon request. If you have any questions, please contact the principal investigator. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. If you find this article useful, please consider donating to support the Open Access Initiative.