Card values
- Cards 2 to 10 count their number.
- Jacks, queens and kings count 10.
- An ace counts 1 or 11, whichever helps your hand. A hand where the ace counts 11 is soft: an ace and a 6 make a soft 17.
A blackjack is 21 with two cards: an ace and a card worth 10. It beats every other hand, including 21 with three cards or more.
Bets
The main bet goes from €5 to €200,000.
How a hand plays
The deal
You get two cards face up. The dealer gets one card face up and one face down.
Insurance
When the dealer’s up card is an ace, you can take insurance for half your bet. It pays 2 to 1 if the dealer has blackjack.
The dealer checks
When the up card is an ace or a card worth 10, the dealer checks for blackjack. If there is one, the hand ends: you lose only your opening bet, or it pushes if you have blackjack too.
You play
Hit, stand, double, split or surrender, as explained below. Over 21, you bust and lose your bet.
The dealer plays
The dealer turns over the hidden card and draws until reaching 17 or more. The dealer stands on all 17s, soft ones included. If the dealer goes over 21, every hand still in play wins.
Your decisions
- Hit: take one more card. You can hit as many times as you like.
- Stand: keep your total and hand over to the dealer.
- Double: double your bet on your first two cards and take exactly one more card, after a split too.
- Split: two cards of the same value (a king and a 10, for example) become two hands, each with a bet equal to the first, up to 4 hands. Split aces get one card each and can’t be split again. A 21 made after a split counts as 21, not as blackjack.
- Surrender: on your first two cards, before any other decision and once the dealer has checked for blackjack, give up the hand and get half your bet back.
Pays
| Result | Pays |
|---|---|
| Blackjack | 3 to 2 |
| Winning hand | 1 to 1 |
| Tie | Push |
| Surrender | Half back |
| Insurance | 2 to 1 |
Basic strategy
At every decision, one action earns the most on average: that is basic strategy, worked out for the table’s rules. The “Show best play” option shows it hand by hand, with the reason. Following it, you lose on average €0.29 for every €100 bet.
Return to player
Return to player (RTP) is the share of the money bet that comes back to players over the long run, stake included.
| Bet | Return to player | Method |
|---|---|---|
| Main bet | 99.71% | simulation of 2 billion hands, basic strategy (± 0.005%) |
| Insurance | 92.60% | exact count |
The 6-deck shoe is shuffled by the server before every hand with the operating system’s cryptographic random generator: counting cards gets you nowhere.