A lot of people with lots of blackjack experience can be frightened by playing on the computer without the knowledge of online blackjack strategies. Not to worry, though, the strategies for online casinos are very much similar to US casinos. For starters, you need to know how to play the game. It is simple, really, all players gets two cards with the dealer getting one card up and one card down. Since you are playing against the dealer and not the other players, their cards only matter if you are counting the cards. You want to get your card’s total to 21 or as close as possible without going over, and if your total is higher than the dealer’s you win! What could be simpler? The dealer only has one card face up and there are more 10’s in the deck than anything else, one usually assumes that the hole card (or the card that is face down in the dealer’s hand) is a 10. This can lead to some interesting strategies. If the dealer’s card for example is a 4, 5, or 6, you can believe that they’re holding a 14, 15 or 16 and are more liable to bust by getting another 10, so be very careful about hitting your hand. As a rule, if you are holding anything higher than a 12, you just want to keep your hand the way it is and let the dealer go bust. This will happen more often than not. Each US casino and online casino will have certain house rules about when you can double down. What doubling down means, you put another bet for equal the amount of your first one, and you only get one card from the dealer no matter what it is. When you are allowed to double down on anything, you only want to limit doing this to 9’s, 10’s, and 11’s since it is more than likely that you’ll get a 10 from the dealer. Many US casinos will limit doubling down to 10’s and 11’s, but online casinos can have much looser rules in that respect. If you get two cards of the same kind, you have the choice to split them. You put up another bet the same as the original one, and are dealt two more cards (one for each of the split ones) and now have two separate blackjack hands. Every strategy books say that you should always split Aces and eights. With the aces, this gives you the option of getting two blackjacks which pay out more than just a winning hand. If you have eights, this gives you the opportunity to upgrade your hand from a 16 to getting two 18’s. You need to remember to add up your original hand first, if it’s a good one like a 20, you don’t want to risk splitting two tens and getting a bad hand, or worse, to bad hands. Because of these basic online blackjack strategies, you can play quite well whether in a US casino or and online casino. Is there a difference really? Well, the main difference is that with online play, the casino is not paying a dealer to deal, nor are they waiting for cards to be shuffled so more hands can be played in an hour. Because of this, they can offer bonus bets or bonuses on special hands. This will vary from site to site, but they are a lot of fun and can net you quite a bit if you win. So have fun, enjoy, and shuffle up and deal!