The basic idea behind blackjack is to make as many hands as possible equal to or less than 21. In order to do this, you must identify the blackjack tree.
There are a few things you need to know in order to identify the blackjack tree:
1. The dealer’s up card.
2. The amount of bet (in dollars).
3. The player’s hole card.
4. The rank of the dealer’s up card (high, middle, low).
5. Whether the deck is loaded or not (this will be covered later in this article).
Once you have these five pieces of information, it is relatively easy to figure out which hands are good and which hands are bad. For example, if the dealer’s up card is an Ace and the player has a two of clubs, that hand is bad because it isn’t close to 21 (having a two of clubs would make a hand such as Aces through 10s good).
Conversely, if the player has an Ace and the dealer has a four of spades, that hand is good because it is very close to 21 (having an Ace and any other card would make that hand bad).
