"Fun-To-Know: Black Jack Made Simple!" (2003)

Robert Hood is back teaching an easy and popular casino game that's easy to understand.

Since I was a kid, my grandmother from my father's side, who lived her entire retired life in Las Vegas, casinos and casino games, let alone the fabulous city, are no strangers to me making the gaming capital of the world my second home. As I grew older, I noticed my parents partaking in the most popular casino game that's easy to play and learn: Black Jack. If you care to know, I got my casino gaming kick playing gambling games on the Nintendo!

This DVD is presented and taught by Robert Hood—the same dealer who taught Craps Made Simple!. While, yes, it's almost irrelevant for me personally, knowing the game pretty well, there are those out there who aren't familiar with the game. I also thought this was a great chance to pick up on something I could have missed or never knew about.

If you've watched the Craps Made Simple! DVD, or read our review on it, you likely knew how I felt about Hood's teaching style. Because he isn't too much a front-of-the-camera person, I feel he does get ahead of himself at times as this presentation shows it. Other than that, it should be easy to pick up on the game and Hood did a much better job with teaching. This could be another one of those "classroom" style of teaching which may induce frequent yawning and loss of attention. (It is my personal belief that while some subjects are tougher than others, I feel a subject can be easily be understood depending on who's teaching it and how they teach it.)

You learn everything you need to get up and running with the game of Black Jack. Hood did a nice job also suggesting whether to Hit or Stand when you compare your cards to the dealer's hand. Since there are tutorials about card counting and guides reminding you what choice(s) to make, Hood gave some basic advice when it comes to deciding what to do with your draw.

The DVD information remains the same: The video is in full screen (4:3) format—interlaced—with an MPEG-2 (mpgv) compression (the frame rate at 29.97). The audio is compressed via A52 Audio (ac3) over a 48000 Hz sample rate with 32 bits.

I'd say majority of my critique with this DVD has to go to the editing of the video. When choosing the "PLAY ALL" option, the gap between the segments are too long, roughly around 3 to 5 seconds. The menu also didn't include the jazzy soundtrack I enjoyed when playing this DVD, and to top it off, some of the jumpcuts were done albeit poor timing. That jazzy piano music often fades in too early and sometimes too late in-between segments, rendering the entire edit too amateur-ish. Honestly, it was like "oh gosh, another DVD to edit so we'll just do a half-ass job at it and as long as we meet the deadline, we'll just get people to buy it." Not to say this was a "cash grab" since the DVD was fine, but the editing was lazily done, as if an intern was given a golden chance to edit this video in order to get considered full-time, only to find that video editing was too tough and tedious wishing they could consider another career instead. Nevertheless, I don't understand how any production company approved the quality control (QC) of this product.

While this was a better-made presentation by Mr. Hood, the edits may nick off some of your eagerness in learning the popular casino game. You get all the basics and the stuff you need to know to get you up and running. Besides the poorly-done edits, this wasn't too bad.

Kris Caballero

Founder of KCU Network and KCU Plus, Kris has been writing since he started blogging in late 2005. Officially back to doing computer programming, Kris enjoys reading books on Mathematics, Quantum Computing, Philosophy, plus playing old video/MS-DOS games, digital video archiving, listening to sports, public radio and classical music.

• About me • Contact me