One of the most common mistakes made in blackjack is counting cards wrong. When a player counts cards, they are trying to determine which hand has the higher total value.
The easiest way to think about it is to think of it as adding up the face values of all the cards in your hand. If you have a 10 and an 8 in your hand, for example, you would add those two numbers together and that would give you a total of 12.
If you were playing against another player, and that player had a 2 and a 3 in their hand, your 10 would only equal 6 because the 2 and 3 add up to 6.
There are a few other things that can affect how many points your hand is worth, but counting cards is usually what people mistake for being stiff. A stiff in blackjack means that a player is not going to be making any bets or playing any hands.
This can be a huge advantage because it means that the dealer will have to give them more cards than usual, which can lead to bigger wins. Because stiff players are not going to be making any bets or playing any hands, they will almost always end up with more hands than normal at the end of the game.
So what does this mean for you as a player? It means that if you want to win at blackjack, you need to be very careful about how much information you give away about your hand. If you are not sure whether or not someone is a stiff player, it is usually safer to stay quiet and let them make their own decisions.
