Yahoo! Blackjack - Never Split 10's

Another big error I see all the time is the splitting of 10's. Once again, only if you are counting cards and only if the deck is very rich in 10's and even then only if the dealer has a very bad upcard should you even consider splitting 10's. 20 is a good hand!!! Why break it up??

Think about this for a moment... you don't get good hands all that often! When you do you certainly don't wish to make it any easier on the dealer by breaking up your good hand!

I asked a girl the other day why she did this and her answer was, "Because I have a chance to win more money." Hey, she's right! On one occasion she kept splitting her 10's, seven times on one hand alone, and therefore had $7,000 dollars riding on that particular hand! Obviously, she now has a greater chance to win $7,000 than she did if she had not split in the first place. (Her chances of winning $7,000 before she started splitting were zero, since she only had her $1,000 out there!) However what she fails to realize is her chance of losing $7,000 also increase! And with a bunch of bad hands out there now, her chances of losing are now greater than her chances of winning! In fact in this case, she was splitting 10's when the dealer had a 9 up which made it even worse!

As it turned out, she lost almost every hand when the dealer flipped over a 10 for a total of 19. Her original 20 would have been a winner. But hey, like she said, she "had a chance" to win more money.

Never split 10's. It's a sucker play. The people who you see do it almost always have a large negative total in front of them. Doesn't that alone tell you something?? I've accumulated $303,000 in the past couple of weeks playing blackjack at Yahoo! (I currently have $343,000 but about $40,000 of that was earned at the poker tables, before blackjack was available) and I have yet to split 10's!

Jeff here had a great hand here, 20 against the dealer's upcard of an 8. So what does he do? He breaks up this great hand into three hands, all of which were worse than what he had in the first place. He should have won $1,000 here. Instead he lost $1,000 for a difference of $2,000 dollars.

This happens often when 10's are split.

Splitting 10's may be fun... and at times it may also produce a big win. But your main objective should be to make the play, each and every time, which is best in the long run. And splitting 10's is not the way to go.

When you check out the Basic Strategy chart, located on a separate page, you'll see 10's are not to be split, no matter what the dealer upcard is.