Those Weird California Games

In an attempt to shut down the wild gambling saloons that had flourished in San Francisco's lawless Barbary Coast district since the Gold Rush, the state legislature made many games, including twenty-one and all house-banked casino-style games, illegal.

Flash forward a hundred years and you have all kinds of unusual card games being offered in California's poker rooms and Indian reservation casinos where the target total is 22 instead of 21, where other traditional features of blackjack have been altered so as to skirt the law, where games are being banked by players, by syndicates of players, by player "pools," where jokers are added to the shoes, etc., etc.

Thanks to a state referendum that passed a few years ago, the Indian reservation casinos in California are now legally permitted to offer standard, house-banked, casino blackjack games. Nevertheless, many of the bizarre blackjack variations that were invented during the years when traditional twenty-one was illegal in the state have remained. The state's poker rooms, for example, are still forbidden to offer traditional blackjack garnes, so any of the games you find that are not in Indian reservation casinos are non-traditional variations on the game. And some of the games being offered in the Indian reservation casinos are still the pseudo-blackjack variationssimply because the games became popular with the casino's customers when the traditional games were forbidden.

So, when you're in any California casino or poker room, if you see a blackjack table, be careful. It may not be the game you think it is. These games usually have names like "California Blackjack," or "California 22," or "Newjack 21," or "No-Bust Blackjack," etc. You should also know that there is no one strategy for the California games. There are at least a dozen variations of pseudo-blackjack in the state, and each variation has its own quirks, rules, and optimum strategies.