Blackjack Insurance

If you wish to take insurance you can bet an amount up to half of your original bet. The Insurance bet is placed separately on a special portion of the table, which usually carries the words "Insurance Pays 2:1". If you're taking Insurance you are placing a bet that the dealer was dealt a blackjack, and this bet pays off 2:1 if it wins. It is called insurance because it protects the original wager if the dealer actually has a blackjack. If you bet half of the original wager, you win the original bet. When betting half of the original wager on insurance and you don't have blackjack but the dealer does, no money is lost. Of course, it happens more often than not that the dealer ends up not having blackjack and you still win or lose the bet, and the insurance bet is forfeit.

Insurance is a bad bet if your not counting cards and if you have no knowledge of the hole card because it has a house edge of 2% up to 15%, depending on number of decks used and visible 10-cards. Essentially, taking insurance amounts to betting that the dealer's hole card is a ten or face card. Since in an infinite online blackjack deck, 4 of the 13 cards are tens or face cards, an unbiased insurance wager would actually pay 9:4, or 2.25:1. Since the bet on insurance only pays 2:1, the casino has a strong advantage. However, if you have been counting cards, you may know that more than a third of the deck is ten-value cards, in which case insurance becomes a good bet. This would not be possible in an online casino.