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Online Pontoon Rules And Strategy

 

Pontoon is a variant of blackjack in which both the dealer’s cards dealt face down. You have to make the decisions without seeing any of the dealer’s cards. In order to compensate for this disadvantage, some of the rules and payouts are tweaked in favor of the player. Therefore pontoon requires different strategy from normal blackjack. Pontoon also uses different nomenclature, with a blackjack being a pontoon, doubling being buying a card, hit being twist and stand being stick.

The exact rules vary from online casino to online casino. The following are fairly common pontoon rules. Pontoon pays at 2 to 1, instead of the blackjack payout of 3 to 2. A five card hand that has not busted pays at 2 to 1 against any dealer hand except a pontoon. The player can buy a card at any time in the game and can twist any number of times after a buying a card. The dealer wins ties. The dealer twists on a soft 17. The player twists on a hand value of 14 or less. After accounting for these changes pontoon offers an average return of 99.6%, which is on par with other blackjack variants. This is based on the deployment of optimum pontoon strategy.

The basics of the optimum pontoon strategy are outlined below. On your initial two-card hand, you should stick with hard hand values of 15 and more and also stick with an ace and an eight, nine or ten. You should buy a card for hard totals of 10 and 11. You should split eights and aces and twist in all other situations. With three cards dealt, you should stick for hard totals of 15 and more. You should buy a card for hard totals of 9, 10 and 11 and for soft totals of 19 and 20 and twist in all other conditions. With four cards dealt, you should stick for hard totals of 18 and more. You should twist for a hard total of 17 and buy a card in all other conditions. With a five card hand you should always stick.

The best online casinos do not expect you to memorize the optimum pontoon strategy. They provide a strategy card along with the game from which the decisions in any given situation can be read. Unlike in the normal blackjack strategy card, the player’s hand value is indexed against the number of cards dealt to him.

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