Insurance at Blackjack

Insurance with Blackjack

Insurance is a common theme within the world. Almost everything that costs money in your life has the option to take out insurance on it. In fact, you can even take out insurance on your life! Blackjack is no different, but Insurance works in a slightly different way for the classic table game.

How does insurance work?

Insurance is a side bet that is available at the majority of Blackjack tables. It can often be tempting when it appears, because of the increased payout over the usual Blackjack winning odds. The offer for insurance appears to players whenever the dealer shows an Ace as their card. This means that there is a potential for the dealer to have a natural Blackjack if their other card is worth 10. Insurance is a bet that you place on top of your initial bet that will pay out 2/1 if the dealer does indeed have a Blackjack.

This means that if you placed an initial wager of R10 on your bet and then a wager of R5 on insurance, you will break even if the dealer has a Blackjack, if you don’t have 21 yourself that is. Here are the potential returns you can get from playing this particular wager.

- If you lose the hand and the dealer doesn’t get a Blackjack, you will get a return of nothing from a total wager of R15

- If you get 21 and the dealer doesn’t get a Blackjack then you will get a return of R20 from a total wager of R15

- If you get a Blackjack and the dealer doesn’t get a Blackjack then you will get a return of R30 from a total wager of R15

- If you lose the hand and the dealer gets a Blackjack then you will get a return of R15 from a wager of R15

- If you get a 21 or Blackjack and the dealer gets a Blackjack then you will get a return of R25 from a wager of R15

As you can see, the range of different outcomes is quite large when choosing to use insurance.

Should you use insurance?

When you’re driving a car, you should definitely use insurance. When you’re playing Blackjack, it’s a different answer. Insurance in Blackjack is generally thought of as a waste of money. Although there are a lot of different outcomes, with the majority of the range of outcomes at least breaking even, it’s not really as simple as that.

What really matters is how often each one is likely to occur. The stats surrounding insurance tell us that more often than not, when you take out insurance you will end up making a loss. The reason behind this includes a little bit of outside the box thinking, so strap yourself in for this.

Basically, the insurance has nothing to do with your original bet. The bet that you are placing when you choose to take insurance is that the hidden card for the dealer has a value of 10. That is it. So, if you think about that statistically, what are the chances that the hidden card is a 10? Without wanting to blow your mind with all the working out, the chances of it being worth 10 are around a third. That means that the chances of it not being 10 are around two thirds.

So, because your chances of losing the insurance bet are significantly higher than your chances of winning it, it doesn’t make sense to take this bet. For every time that you win your insurance bet, you will lose twice. So if you played 49 hands with a R5 wager for insurance, with the initial deal laid out perfectly in the favour of insurance, you would make a loss of R5 at the end of it. So even with the odds stacked in favour of the insurance, you still come out of it making a loss.