I was wondering whether and to what extent an upcard-less blackjack variant would be analyzable and/or exploitable. Insurance is not available in this case, so any player naturals would have to be paid out immediately after inspection of the dealer's two downcards to see if the player wins or pushes. Furthermore, the player's decisions would be based solely on the value of his own hand rather than the probable strength of his hand relative to that of the dealer's. He would inevitably be hitting, standing, doubling down, and splitting in sub-optimal EV situations due to lack of information of one of the dealer's cards, so that his overall edge would be lower. Thus, if such a game was offered and the EV with basic strategy turned out to be much lower than that of ordinary blackjack, the house may consider offering slightly +EV rules to compensate and make the game more attractive to the ploppies (e.g. early surrender). I also suspect that combinatorial analysis of basic strategy would be substantially easier, since one wouldn't have to condition on nearly as many sub-cases and specific situations with a given hand (e.g. hard 12 vs. 3, hard 12 vs 4., etc.) because one doesn't have knowledge of that upcard. Thoughts?
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