If the dealer’s upcard is an ace, the player is offered the option of taking insurance before the dealer checks his or her ‘hole card’.
Insurance is a side bet of up to half the original bet placed on a special portion of the table usually marked “Insurance Pays 2 to 1″. This side bet is offered only when the dealer’s exposed card is an ace. The idea is that the dealer’s second card has a fairly high probability (nearly one-third) to be ten-valued, giving the dealer a blackjack and almost certainly results in a loss for the player.
(Thus,the expression, “ace in the hole”). It is attractive (although not necessarily wise) for the player to insure against this possibility by making an “insurance” bet, which pays 2-to-1 if the dealer has a blackjack, in which case the “insurance proceeds” will make up for the concomitant loss on the original bet. The insurance bet is lost if the dealer does not have blackjack, although the player can still win or lose on the original bet.
Insurance is a poor bet for the player unless he is counting cards because, in an infinite deck, 4/13 of the cards have a value of ten (10, J, Q, or K) and 9/13 therefore are not, so the theoretical return for an infinite deck game is 4/13 * 2 * bet – 9/13 * bet = -1 /13 * bet, or -7.69%. In practice, the average house edge will be lower than this, because by eliminating even one non-ten card from the shoe (the dealer’s ace), the dealer causes the proportion of the remaining cards that are valued at ten to be higher. Even so, the bet is generally to be avoided, as the house’s average edge is still more than 7%.
A player who is counting cards can keep count of the remaining tens in the shoe and use it to make insurance bets only when he or she has an edge (e.g., when more than one third of the remaining cards are tens). In addition, in a multi-hand single deck game, it is possible for insurance to be a good bet if the player simply observes the other cards on the table – for an initial hand, if the dealer has an ace, then there are 51 cards left in the deck, of which 16 are tens. However, if there are as few as 2 players playing, and neither of their two initial cards is a ten, then 16 of 47 remaining cards are tens – better than 1 in 3, making the insurance bet a good one.[5]
When the player has blackjack and the dealer has an ace, the insurance bet March be offered as “even money”, meaning that the player’s blackjack is paid immediately at 1:1 before checking the dealer’s hand. ‘Even money’ is only a slightly different bet; the difference being that the player must have sufficient funds to insure blackjack if even money is not offered. Taking even money is generally a poor choice, because one of the player’s two cards is a ten, so the proportion of tens remaining in the deck is lower.
In casinos in which a hole card is dealt, a dealer who is showing a card with a value of ace or 10 March slide the corner of his hole card over a small mirror or electronic sensor on the tabletop in order to check whether he has a blackjack. This practice minimizes the risk of inadvertently revealing the hole card, which March give the sharp-eyed player a considerable advantage.
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