A store local to me has started offering late surrender and surrender after splitting. At first glance, I thought that surrender after split would result in a decent improvement in the house edge. However after looking into it both by searching the web and generating my own strategy and results, the improvement is not as good as I had hoped.
I found that there is only a 0.01% improvement for the conditions offered at this store (6 decks, 83% pen (5 decks), S17, DOA, DAS, SP4, LS, surrender after split, including aces) and almost all of it comes from being able to surrender after splitting aces. For surrender after split, but not after splitting aces, the improvement is essentiually zero, both according to The Wizard and my own results. This is because no additional splits are recommended and so you would only consider surrendering after splitting 8 vs 9, 10, A or after splitting 9 vs 9. There are just too few opportunities to make any difference.
More opportunities arise when splitting aces, since the only other option after splitting is to stand. Using the following stratagy when splitting aces gets you the 0.01%:
http://gronbog.org/results/blackjack...VsStand.6.html
To summarize, surrender any total less than 17 vs 9, 10 and Ace. This strategy was generated using my simulator but is probably what most experienced players would have come up with on their own.
Some notes about the strategy table:
- If you hover your mouse over a given cell, you will see the simulated results for each action. This works best with Internet Explorer and recent versions of Firefox. Older versions of Firefox show the information all on one line.
- The chart conditions at the top of the page and the key at the bottom both refer to DBJ (may double blackjack) and ESTA (early surrender vs 10 and Ace). The actual store does not offer these, however my simulator always generates probabilities for them (where appropriate) since they are both final plays and don't affect the results of other plays.
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