The Big Trick

Every pseudo-blackjack game has a big trick to it - something the house did to fundamentally change the game that is not immediately apparent to the players, but that is very apparent to the house in their bottom-line profits. With Spanish 21, the big trick is the removal of all the pip tens. All of the jacks, queens, and kings are there, but the actual tens, the ones with ten pips (diamonds, hearts, clubs, or spades) on them, are nowhere to be found. You may know that the tens atr the most important denomination. You may also recall that "all modem card-counting systems today are based on Ed Thorp's Ten-Count". For blackjack players who are attempting to beat the house, cardcounting strategies are based primarily on the tens. It is the presence of excess tens in the deck that provide us with our strongest advantages.

So, in the Spanish 21 game, what those devious casino game inventors did was remove all of the pip tens from an eight-deck shoe, which is to say, they took out thirtytwo of our beloved tens! That's a hell of a lot of tens!

Years ago, some of the casinos in Puerto Rico had a reputation for removing tens from their shoe games. This was not a good reputation as far as players were concerned. In fact, it was considered to be cheating. There is a book that was published in 1999, written by a former Nevada Gaming Control agent, Bill Zender, How to Detect Casino Cheating at Blackjack, in which Bill describes a cheating technique called the "short deck," in which the dealer (or boss) secretly removes tens from the deck in order to give the house an unnaturally high advantage over the players.

Well, with Spanish 21, it's no secret! They just up and stole thirty-two of those tens out of the shoe, and said, "Card counters welcome!"

They put all kinds of bonuses and extra good rules into the game that you don't get with regular blackjack. But, unfortunately, all those great rules just won't make up for all those missing tens.

You actually can get a small advantage on Spanish 21 with card counting, but you need a relatively huge betting spread, which requires a relatively huge bankroll, and the strategy is much more difficult. In fact, the Spanish 21 basic strategy is much more difficult than regular blackjack because of all those weird bonuses and options. So we recommend to play it just in case you find yourself on a desert island where it's the only game available, and you're feeling like a glutton for punishment.

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