Surrender In Blackjack: What You Need To Know

Proper use of early or late surrender in blackjack can greatly decrease the house advantage against professional players. While less prevalent today, surrender does still exist in a number of bricks-and-mortar casinos, and on the majority of electronic table games and online casinos, such as https://casinofavoriter.com.

What Is Surrender In Blackjack?

Surrender is simply a generous blackjack rule allowing you to give up half of your bet after peeping at your first two cards and the dealer up card.
If your hand holds less than a 50 percent chance against the dealer, then surrender time has arrived.

There are two forms of surrender rules, known as either early or late surrender. We will cover both, although early surrender is becoming more and more rare in its original form, where it hasn't been watered down by other less favorable rule changes.

Early Surrender

Early surrender provides you with the opportunity to surrender a half of your bet before you check the hole card for blackjack by the dealer. It has a significant effect on house edge since players are able to surrender a half of their bet on bad hands against an up card ace by the dealer.

Early surrender was a byproduct of some questionable decisions by the Casino Control Commission and early operators in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the late 70s when casinos first became legal there.

Hoping that liberal rules would attract players, and not wanting the dealers to know their hole card through possible collusion, they created this new surrender variant. Loosing .6 percent to the casino's house edge, even basic strategy players had a slight edge.

In fact, this modification of the rule was so disastrous that then New Jersey Governor Byrne felt compelled to step in and uphold the New Jersey Casino Control Commission's ruling to dispense with the usual public hearing procedure since they believed that allowing the early surrender option to continue for the 60 days which is usually available for public comment presented an "imminent peril" for casino operators.

This extreme rule variation is not normally available now in brick-and-mortar casinos.

• If you happen to encounter it online, we recommend that you carefully examine all the house rules because they'll likely have been changed to make up for the loss to the house edge.
• If the rules are fair you will need to drop 14, 15 or 16 when the dealer has a 10.
• If the dealer has an ace, you will have to give up hard 5, 6, 7 and 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17.
• If the dealer stands on soft 17, you will also have to give up hard 4.

Late Surrender

Late surrender is not like early surrender because you only lose your hand and half your bet AFTER the dealer checks to see if he has blackjack. This reduces the value of this option significantly to about .05 to .1 percent.

That does not sound like much, but remember that on a 6 deck shoe with liberal house rules, the edge drops from .42 percent to .35 percent or close to 20 percent in total when late surrender is used to maximum advantage. Thus late surrender can be another tool to help us decrease house edge when available.

Though it will be a no-brainer to locate on Internet casinos or e-tables, in land-based casinos it's not often posted on table signs or elsewhere. Your best bet will probably be to ask the dealer if there's a surrender and if it's late surrender or early. If that wasn't confusing enough, not all casinos use the same hand signals for a surrender in blackjack.

In general, you should use your index finger to make a horizontal line behind your bet, at the same time saying "surrender." This is done in blackjack games dealt from a shoe.

In casinos where handheld games are offered, the surrender rules may differ so if in doubt it is advisable to ask your dealer what the proper procedure is for surrendering your hand. They'll be delighted to demonstrate it to you. You will want to surrender all those hands in which you cannot reasonably have more than a 50 percent chance of winning against the dealer's up card.

But this will be based on house rules such as hit or stand on soft 17 and how many decks are being used.

Here is a very brief summary of late surrender rules:

• If the dealer exposes a 9 up, you should never surrender except when dealt a 16. And then only if the game is being played with four or more decks.
• If the dealer does possess a 10, then always fold if you have 16, and also fold all 15s except in a one deck game.
• If the dealer does have an ace, then things become complicated by whether the house will hit soft 17 or stand.
• If they stand on all 17s, always give up 16 regardless of the number of decks. If they stand on soft 17, you have to give up 15, 16 and 17 regardless of the number of decks.

Total Dependent vs Composition Dependent

These rules of play above apply to so-called 'total dependent', which is that you only care about the totals of your first two cards in order to decide to surrender.

There are rules based on composition for 'surrender', so you are dealt a 9, 6 against an 8, 7. They are each 15, but they are different groups of cards. If you consider this based on composition dependent rules for the single deck game, you need to surrender 9, 6 but play an 8, 7.

There are more than a dozen such exceptions, and it can be considerably confusing for newbies with surrender blackjack options. The minimal advantage gained is probably not worth the added complexity, and left better to experienced players.

So here's a brief summary of early and late surrender and the basic rules for maximizing your advantage in blackjack. If you utilize these appropriately, you'll be able to keep more of your money and play longer.