Splitting Pairs

An extremely important part of blackjack is to know when to take a certain decision. You want to always take the best decisions and thus lower the casino edge to a minimum. One of these decisions is splitting pairs. Splitting pairs when basic strategy suggests it will lower the house advantage by as much as 0.5%. Unfortunately most players do not know when to split pairs and only increase the house advantage by splitting at the wrong time.

Most players split any pair that they get. They do not understand what pair splitting is meant to do for the player. Below you will find a table with suggestions when to split and what hands to split. It may be worth your time to continue reading this section because we will now present the ideas that support pair splitting.

You will want to split in two situations. When you are presented with an offensive situation and when you are presented with a defensive situation. Let's see what that actually means.

A defensive split means that no matter how you play that hand, the house will have the advantage. The best decision is to split the hand. Even if by splitting we double our wager, we should lose as much on this split hand as we would have lost by not splitting.

An offensive split means that you have a good hand and by splitting it you turn that one hand into two possibly better hands. The decision to split that hand must be taken only if it is better than other decisions. The good thing when offensive splitting is that you split a hand with a high chance of winning. You will practically double the money that you would have won with only one hand. You are presented with a positive situation and you make the best of it.

Here is an example of offensive splitting. If you are dealt a pair of 8�s you will have a card total of 16 against the dealer's 5. This is the worst card total in blackjack. The dealer will always have to hit on any card total of 16 or lower. So your chances of winning this hand are minimal. But if you are allowed to split then you may turn that lousy card total of 16 in to two good totals of 18. If you wouldn't have been allowed to split then all you could have done was to stand and hope the dealer busts. This means that the house edge will increase to as much as17%. If the dealer's card would have been a 20 then the house advantage would be 51%.

Splitting at the right time, and most of all offensive splitting can turn a situation in favor of the player. By splitting your hand when the dealer has any card between 2 and 7 you will increase your odds significantly. In the last example, by not splitting the pair of 8's we would have faced a house edge of 17%. But by splitting them we have increased our odds by 31%. Offensive splitting has served its purpose. It has turned an unfavorable situation into a favorable one.

But what if the dealer has an 8, 9, 10 or Ace? In this case our chances of winning the hand are minimal. The house has the upper hand. We must forget about trying to win and thing about minimizing our loses. For example if we have been dealt a pair of 8's and the dealer has a 10, by splitting our hand we will lower the house advantage from 51% to 45%.

Defensive splitting has also served its purpose as it has lowered the house edge and improved a bad situation for the player. It's not all about winning money; it's also about saving your money. It's still better to lose little than to lose big.