Poker Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
Split
Split Like doubling down, a split is only permitted as a first decision of a hand. If you hold two cards of the same value, you may split them into two separate playing hands. If you are playing a hand-held game, you must put the cards face up on the table in front of your bet (just like in a double down). Place the matching bet beside the original bet in the circle. In a split, you must match your original bet; loonie for loonie, toonie for toonie. The dealer will separate the two cards and treat them as two independent hands and hit you with a further card on each of the splits. It should be noted that most casinos will then allow you to double down on either of these hands. This is called a ‘double after split’. If you get additional pairs, most casinos will allow you to resplit. Commonly, a holdem player can split up to three times, making four separate hands, with 4 separate bets. If double after split is allowed you can have up to eight times your initial bet on the table! Keep in mind, you can split any 10-valued cards e.g. a Jack and a 10, but this is usually a bad play… Keep the 20.
Where the splits
Where the splits get tricky: splitting Aces is a very strong holdem player move so casinos only allow you to hit once on each Ace. Also, if you draw a 10-valued card on one of your split aces, the hand is not considered Blackjack but a normal 21, and therefore you do not collect 3:2 odds. Some casinos allow for the resplitting of Aces. You may wonder why it is worth splitting Aces, but as 10-valued cards have the highest occurrence in Blackjack, you should ALWAYS split Aces.