Blackjack: Number of Decks
Knowing the number of decks used on a certain table can seriously help you count your odds as well as the house’s advantage. It is no secret that the number of decks used affects players substantially; you may discretely ask the pit boss or your dealer about the number of decks being used on a single table, but most of the time you will be able to assess it yourself by seeing the kind of shoe used to store the cards.
Casinos usually offer better rules and payout ratio for multi-deck Blackjack tables. Single-deck tables usually pays 6 to 5 for Blackjack, which is fairly low compared to 3 to 2 or even 2 to 1 offered by multi-deck tables. Although the house advantage on multi-deck tables are relatively higher, it will be compensated with better payout ratio as well as other options — such as allowing re-splitting or doubling down after splitting — making the game still very profitable.
You should, however, avoid tables where they use continuous shuffling machine where cards are returned to the shuffler after each round. Such practice makes the house advantage soar very high, and beating the game will be that much harder for sure.