Blackjack guides

Blackjack is a card game with simple rules and a surprisingly wide range of costs. The same hand can be a good or a poor deal depending on the payout for a blackjack, the number of decks, what the dealer does on soft 17 and whether you can double after a split or surrender. The guides in this section turn those rules into numbers, so you can compare tables by what they cost per hour of play and not by how they look. Each article also lists related guides and answers the questions readers ask most often.

We explain what the house edge is, how much each rule changes it, what basic strategy does and does not do, and why card counting is a hard, uncertain method and not a plan for profit. Worked examples use invented figures, marked as hypothetical, so you can follow the arithmetic and repeat it with your own numbers.

None of the pages promises winnings or recommends a casino. Blackjack always has a house edge, results in a session swing far more than the average cost, and gambling is for adults aged 18 or over. Start with the first-time guide if you are new, or with the rules guide if you want to compare tables.