Blackjack

Blackjack — how to play and tips

Blackjack is the classic casino card game, played here against a dealer with standard house rules. You and the dealer each get two cards to start — one of the dealer's two stays face down until the hand is resolved. Your goal is to finish with a total closer to 21 than the dealer's, without going over 21 yourself. Go over and you bust immediately and lose your bet, regardless of what the dealer ends up holding, since your hand is already dead before the dealer even finishes drawing.

How to play

Tap the chip buttons — worth 10, 25, 50 and 100 — to build up your bet for the hand, then press Deal to see your cards and the dealer's. Once the cards are out you can Hit to take another card, Stand to lock in your current total and let the dealer play, or Double to double your original bet in exchange for exactly one more card and no further hits. On desktop, number keys 1 through 4 add chips of increasing value, Enter deals the hand, and H, S and D map directly to hit, stand and double so the whole hand can be played without touching the mouse.

The rules this table uses

A natural blackjack — an ace paired with a ten-value card on your first two cards — pays out at 3:2, the traditional premium payout for hitting 21 immediately rather than building to it. Any other winning hand pays even money, and a tie against the dealer's total pushes, meaning your bet is simply returned rather than won or lost. The dealer plays by a fixed rule with no judgement involved: draw on anything 16 or below, and stand once the total reaches 17 or more, including on a "soft" 17 made with an ace counted as 11. Doubling down is only allowed on your first two cards, before you've taken any hits, and only if your chip stack can actually cover the extra bet.

Aces are valued at 11 by default, but automatically drop to 1 the moment counting them at 11 would bust the hand — and this is worked out across the whole hand at once, not just the most recent card, so a hand like ace-ace-9 correctly resolves as a soft 21 rather than an accidental bust at 31 from double-counting both aces high.

Basic strategy

The dealer's single visible card is the most useful piece of information at the table, because it tells you roughly how likely the dealer is to bust before you ever have to act further. If that card is a 2 through 6, the dealer has a real chance of busting on their own draws, so standing on a merely mediocre total of your own is often the mathematically correct play rather than a nervy one. If the dealer's card is a 7 through ace, the dealer is much more likely to finish with a strong hand, so you generally need to keep improving your own total to compete. As a baseline: stand on any hard 17 or higher, hit on 11 or lower since there's no way to bust from there, and treat 11 as a strong doubling opportunity whenever the dealer's upcard looks weak.

The shoe here uses six decks shuffled together, and it's rebuilt from scratch once it drops below a quarter of its cards remaining. That reshuffle point is frequent enough that card counting — tracking which cards have already come out to estimate what's left — won't meaningfully shift the odds across a long session the way it might against a single continuously-dealt deck, so the more reliable long-run edge comes from playing basic strategy consistently rather than trying to read the shoe.

Managing your bankroll

You start a session with a fixed chip bank, and every hand you play and lose reduces it, so the run itself ends not on a single bad hand but once your chips run out entirely — meaning bet sizing matters as much as playing each individual hand well. Betting a small, consistent fraction of your stack lets you absorb a losing streak without being wiped out by it, while doubling down is worth reserving for the situations basic strategy actually favors rather than as a way to chase back a previous loss. Your peak chip total across the session is tracked as your best result, so a session that ends after a strong run can still register as a personal best even if the very last few hands went the other way.