Even if you’ve been to a land-based casino before, the properties on the famous Las Vegas Strip are in a completely different league to anything you have likely experienced elsewhere. The MGM Grand, just to pick one at random as an example, has 171,500 square feet of gaming space with over 2,500 gaming machines and 139 poker and table games.

Even this doesn’t give you an idea of its true scale, however, as the casino itself is just one part of a much larger complex that also features the largest single hotel in the whole of the United States with almost 7,000 rooms. The building is 30 stories tall, has five outdoor pools, along with rivers and waterfalls that cover 6.6 acres. There’s a convention center, the famous MGM Grand Garden Arena, numerous nightclubs and other entertainment venues, and no less than twelve restaurants.

A trip to the casinos of Las Vegas is an experience you will never forget, and you want to make sure you can enjoy it to the full by participating in the best games on the casino floor. Spinning slots is fun of course, but sitting down to play blackjack with a real dealer is a whole lot more fun, offers you better odds, and will make your money last much longer too.

Never Visited A Land-Based Casino Before?

For those who have only ever played Blackjack online – or perhaps not even at all – you should definitely consider taking one of the many crash courses of gambling lessons that can be found all over Sin City, often inside the casinos themselves.

There are group lessons or more expensive one-on-one coaching available, but it will only take you an afternoon and these gambling lessons will teach you how to play blackjack from the ground up, refreshing anything you already know and filling in all the gaps you might not even know you had.

You’ll cover the cost of the training within your first hour at the Blackjack table, just by not making a host of poor decisions based on intuition rather than mathematics and probability.

I’ve Played Blackjack at my Local Casino – Will It Really be THAT Different?

Perhaps – most notably if you are coming from Europe, you might not be familiar with the hole card rule used in American Blackjack. Whilst American Roulette is much less generous than European Roulette, American Blackjack is actually a little better for the player – all other things being equal – than it’s European counterpart. The differences between the European no-hole card game and American Blackjack aren’t that great though, and can easily be studied online.

Hole card rule aside, are you familiar with all of the different rule variations you might encounter at the tables in Vegas? As a minimum, you should research the following terms:

• Early Surrender
• Double After Split
• Dealer Hits All 17s (H17/S17)
• Blackjack Pays 6-5
• Double on Any 2 Cards
• Double on 9/10/11 or 10/11 only
• Player May Hit Split Aces
• Player May Resplit Aces
• Maximum Number of Splits
• Single Deck
• 6/8 Deck Shoe Game
• Dealer Wins All Ties