A popular game in casinos due to its simple rules and thus accessibility to a wider audience, is Blackjack. While there is no clear single creator, the first reference to the game’s precursor was found in the book “Rinconete y Cortadillo” in which they play the game “Ventiuno,” otherwise Spanish for twenty-one. This game is primarily played in person with multiple standard decks of cards and consists of very fast paced rounds. Perhaps due to its simple rules and fast game speed, the target audience is typically middle-class income individuals that a casino can slowly but steadily win an edge over in the long run. This combination of rapid round of instant gratification along with a strong feeling of control and involvement within the game create a formula easily lures players into an addiction.
The instant gratification of this game comes in the form of seeing how a hand plays out in mere seconds and the ability to quickly play a few more rounds until another win occurs if the first hand does not pan out. In this way the player receives microdoses of dopamine for every winning hand albeit with no guaranteed control over when this will happen. As shown in skinner box experiments, this unfixed schedule of rewarding the player will cause a strong desire to continue playing. I was able to witness this effect firsthand when playing Blackjack with a friend who had recently lost a few rounds. He wanted “just a few more rounds in order to break even” in spite of my insistence that he should probably just walk away. This same allure is present in modern gacha games such as Genshin Impact in which players are given “wishes” that have a very low probability of attaining the character that they want. However, what makes Blackjack more insidious than these systems in which everything is left up to chance, is the feeling of agency that players receive during these games.
Blackjack gives its players choices each round on how to bet, when to hit, when to fold, and so on. Therefore, a player feels in control of each hand even more so than the simulated agency that slot machines give. Every winning hand acts as a testament to their skill and accomplishment. But for losing hands, especially since players can see what may have happened had they made a different choice due to the deal of the cards, players will blame themselves for not playing better. “If only I had/hadn’t hit” was one of the most common phrases uttered by the friends I was playing with. This path of reasoning is what truly makes the game more cruel than any gacha game or slot machine since those games don’t directly tie a player’s loss with their own actions. I found this feeling to be the most oppressive when playing at the tables with a $5 minimum bet. The friends I played with would spend hours upon end trying their luck since such a low minimum bet allows for the fluctuations in wins and losses to not deplete their stockpile of money. The final nail in the coffin is that, at the end of the day, the probabilities of the game will never be in line with the players, especially those who play for a long time. The house edge measures how much of an advantage the casino has over the players for a given game, which for Blackjack is a mere 0.5%. While this is lower than other casino games like roulette slots that can reach as high as 15%, this simply means that the game is designed to draw you in for longer. Statistically, players will always lose 0.5% in the long run so no amount of being able to “play better” will assist in the steady draining of their funds.
As it stands, casino blackjack was designed exceptionally well to cause an addiction to the game. Everything from its simple rules, irregular payout schedule, allowance of player agency in the short-term, and cripplingly slow rate at which it drains money combines into a game that is easy to step into and nigh impossible to step out of.
