We’ve all been in a situation where we were playing an online casino game and felt that we were in a good position to win, only to see our chances swept away by a miracle play from the casino. When you’ve put yourself in a winning position and see it snatched from you, it’s natural to wonder whether there has been some unseen hand carrying out a bit of unfair play, and we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t suspect foul play. But is there any justification for that?
There are many people who will advise you not to play online blackjack, even at a reliable casino such as Wildz casino NZ, because, in their estimation, the game is fixed. This is a particularly common assumption with blackjack, perhaps because game strategy is so well-known. You can find yourself in a position where only a full blackjack can beat you, getting ready to cash out, and then out of nowhere; the dealer hits blackjack. You’ve done everything right and still lose. How is that fair? Well, let’s look a little deeper.
First of all, the Game isn’t Rigged
Let’s be clear about one thing. A casino cannot get a license unless it proves that the software it uses to run a game is legitimate. Your blackjack hand – and that of the dealer – is decided by algorithmic software known as a Random Number Generator (RNG). That software is checked by licensing authorities, and if it is in any way unfair, the license will not be given. It may hurt to lose – and that’s precisely why we react to losing in such a way – but the truth of the matter is you will sometimes lose when winning seems so certain.
Why?
The whole point of random chance is that sometimes it will go against you. You’ve landed 20 at the blackjack table; the dealer is showing 10. All you can do is stand pat; in the vast majority of cases, your cards will win this hand. The chances of the dealer turning over an Ace here are close to 1 in 12. In other words, not very likely at all. However, 1 in 12 is very far from impossible. One out of every 12 months is January, but January comes around regularly all the same. It’s unfortunate that the dealer pulled an Ace right when the majority of other cards would have won you the hand, but it’s not impossible, and rigging is not the reason it happened.
What if it Keeps Happening?
People’s diagnosis of cheating at a casino is generally subject to confirmation bias. If the same unlikely scenario crops up more than once, you’re going to feel like it’s tilted against you, and many of us will assume something underhand is the cause. But here’s the truth: yes, casino games are tilted against you. There’s a reason they say the house always wins. To keep beating the casino as a player is fundamentally unlikely because the odds are in their favor from the beginning.
Most of the time, when you have 20, and the house is showing 10, you will win. But if the reverse happens more than once in a game, you’ll remember those hands all the more and assume you’ve been cheated. You haven’t been, and stranger things happen every day. It’s annoying when it happens to you, but playing in a casino is often annoying. We keep playing because sometimes we win, and that levels out the annoyance.
