Why You Should Almost Never Surrender in Most Blackjack Games

Published: December 12, 2013

The surrender option is often available in blackjack games on the Internet. The general idea of surrendering is that you can give up chances of winning your hand in exchange for receiving back half of your bet. For example, if you had a $5 bet, you could surrender and just take a loss of $2.50 instead of trying to play out the hand. As you can imagine, doing this on a lot of hands will end up with you losing a ton of money because you're losing half of a bet every single time that you do it.

For this reason, the surrender tactic should only be played in the most unfavorable situation where you're going to lose more than half of your bet on average if you play out the hand. In standard shoe blackjack games like those played online where the dealer stands on soft 17 hands, there are only two main situations where you should surrender. If you have a hard 16 and you're facing a nine, ten or ace, then you should surrender. Also, if you have a hard 15 and you are facing a ten, then you should surrender there too. With that having been said, do not surrender a hard 15 when you're facing an ace. It seems anti-intuitive, but that's just how it works out mathematically.

In games with the dealer hitting on a soft 17, then there are two changes that you'll need to make to this strategy. First off, you will be surrendering a hard 15 when you're up against an ace. Also, you'll be surrendering with a hard 17 against an ace as well. It might seem backwards to surrender with a strong hand like a hard 17, but an ace with the ability to hit on a soft 17 is one of the most powerful starting hands that the dealer can have in all of blackjack, and that's why it works out the way that it does.

Learning how to surrender correctly is one of the skills that a lot of blackjack players never really learn. It doesn't come up often, and it's something that a lot of people can skip over without caring about without really losing a ton of value for it. In fact, it's the players who surrender more than they should who miss out on the most value when it comes to this particular strategic option.