When it comes to blackjack insurance, novice players often wonder if it’s a good bet or not. It’s a makes good financial sense to insure your home and car, so why not your blackjack hand?
While insuring your property is almost always a good bet, blackjack insurance is almost always a bad bet.
If the dealer has an Ace showing, he or she will ask if you want to “buy insurance” before the hand plays out. You may put up to half your original bet on insurance to win 2:1 if the dealer has 21. Essentially, you break even on the hand when the dealer has blackjack.
Taking insurance in blackjack is one of those things that sounds good logically. But in the end, the casino is the only one making money with it.
The reason it’s so tempting to take insurance is that basic blackjack advice is to always assume the dealer’s down card is a 10. So why is taking insurance in blackjack a bad idea? Because the odds just don’t add up.
In any single deck of cards, there are 16 cards which are have a value of Ten (10, J, Q, K, each of four suits) and 36 which don’t. So the odds of the dealer having a Ten are 36:16 or 9:4, which equals 30.77% or about 1/3 of the time. However you are only being paid out 2:1 (8:4) for a 9:4 event, so the house clearly has an edge on the insurance bet.
Some articles, books and forums bring up the fact that in certain situations where the shoe has more tens that usual, it’s to the player’s advantage to take insurance. The only way to know when that situation occurs is if you can count cards – something that is difficult to learn and get away with these days.
So take the advice that most experts agree on; always avoid taking insurance in blackjack.