🃏Play Blackjack

Blackjack is the only common casino game where the player's decisions genuinely change the odds, which is why it has been analysed more thoroughly than any other. Basic strategy — the correct play for every combination of your hand and the dealer's up card — was worked out in the 1950s and cuts the house edge to well under one percent.

The dealer has no decisions at all. They draw to seventeen and stop, every time, which is what makes the game solvable: you always know exactly what your opponent will do. Your entire edge comes from the fact that you can stand on twelve and they cannot.

This table uses a six-deck shoe reshuffled when it runs low, the dealer stands on all seventeens, and a natural blackjack pays three to two. Doubling is available on any two cards. Splitting and insurance are left out — insurance is a bad bet at these odds anyway, and splitting adds a lot of state for a small gain.

You start with five hundred chips and the score is your stack. There is no real money involved anywhere on this site, and nothing here is an inducement to gamble — it is arithmetic under pressure, which is the part that is actually fun.