Blackjack – Play Online for Free

Blackjack is a duel with the house: you do not play against other players but against the dealer, and whoever gets closer to 21 without going over wins the round. Every decision comes down to the same question, one more card or call it a day. That very mix of luck and cool calculation has made the game a fixture of casino floors. Here you bet play chips with no real money value and try to grow your starting stack to a goal you set yourself.

The idea of playing to 21 is several centuries old. The first written trace leads to Miguel de Cervantes: in his story Rinconete y Cortadillo, written around 1601, two young card sharps in Seville are experts at a card game built around twenty-one. In England the first rules appeared in 1800 under the French name vingt-un, and the British still play their own home version, Pontoon, in which you twist or stick rather than hit or stand. In the United States the game showed up early in the 19th century, and it was first called blackjack there around 1899.

Where that name comes from is often told the wrong way. American gambling houses supposedly paid a bonus of 10 to 1 for the Ace of Spades together with a black Jack. The French playing card historian Thierry Depaulis found no evidence for that. He traces the name back to the gold prospectors of the Klondike: to them, blackjack was a word for zinc blende, an ore often found alongside gold and silver, and they passed it on to the best hand in the game. Mathematics made the game famous, too: in 1956 Roger Baldwin and three colleagues published the first strategy worked out by calculation, and building on it, Edward O. Thorp made card counting widely known in the early 1960s with his book Beat the Dealer.

Hit or Stand: Rules and Strategy for Blackjack

The game is dealt from six decks of 52 cards, which are reshuffled once about three quarters of them have been used. Number cards count their face value, Jack, Queen and King count 10 each, and the Ace counts 11 or 1, whichever helps you more. If your hand contains an Ace, the game shows both possible totals.

• Goal and bet: You start with 1,000 chips and decide beforehand which total you are playing for: 1,500, 2,000, 2,500, 3,000 or 5,000. You bet with chips worth 5, 10, 25, 50 and 100, and Deal gets the round going.
• The deal: You receive two face-up cards, the dealer one face up and one face down.
• Blackjack: An Ace and a card worth 10 as your first two cards. It pays 3 to 2, and if the dealer has one too, you get your bet back. If only the dealer holds a blackjack, the round is lost at once.
• Hit and Stand: Hit gives you another card, Stand ends your hand. Go over 21 and you have busted and lose your bet. At exactly 21, drawing stops.
• Double Down: With the first two cards of a hand you may double your bet. In return you get exactly one more card, and the hand is then finished.
• Split: Two cards of the same value, King and Queen included, can be split into two hands with a bet on each, once per round. Each hand then receives a second card and may be doubled down as well. Split Aces get only one card each, and a 21 made from a split hand does not count as a blackjack.
• The dealer: The dealer turns over the hidden card and keeps drawing until reaching at least 17. A win pays 1 to 1, and a tie, called a push, returns your bet. There is no insurance and no surrender.
• End of the match: Reach your goal and you have won. If your stack drops below 5 chips, the match is lost.

The three levels differ in genuine table rules. On Easy, any hand of four cards wins at once as long as it stays at 21 or below and the dealer has no blackjack, the so-called Four Card Charlie. Normal matches the usual casino table. On Hard the dealer also draws on a soft 17, meaning a 17 in which an Ace counts as 11, and a blackjack pays only 6 to 5.

These rules of thumb from basic strategy will serve you well:

• Stand from 17 up: With 17 or more and no Ace counting as 11, you never draw. The risk of busting is simply too high.
• Watch the dealer's face-up card: With 13 to 16 you stand when the dealer shows a 2 through 6, because the dealer will often bust. If the dealer shows a 7 or higher, you hit. A 12 you stand on only against a 4 through 6.
• Double down on 10 and 11: Double an 11 against anything except an Ace, and a 10 against a 2 through 9.
• Split Aces and Eights: Always split two Aces and two Eights, but never two Fives or two Tens, since 10 and 20 are already strong starting points.
• Make the most of soft hands: When an Ace counts as 11, one more card cannot bust you. With a soft 17 or less you therefore always take another card, unless you double down.
• Chase the Charlie on Easy: Holding three small cards, reaching for a fourth pays off more often there than elsewhere, because it wins your hand on the spot as long as you stay under 22.

After the Last Hand: Five Games Where Numbers and Memory Count

If you enjoy doing sums, weighing up odds and remembering cards, these will suit you as well:

• Pyramid Solitaire: Adding up matters here too, only the magic number is 13 instead of 21. Any two cards with that total leave the pyramid, and a King departs alone.
• Calculation Solitaire: Counting without a dealer and without any risk of going bust. Four foundations grow at fixed intervals of one to four, and you choose where to set down a card that does not fit anywhere yet.
• Memory: Counting cards is above all a job for your memory. That is exactly what you train here, by remembering where each card lay and turning up identical pairs.
• Scopa: This Italian card game also works with card values. A card from your hand captures cards from the table whose values add up to its own, and whoever sweeps the table clean scores a point.
• Aces Up: In blackjack the Ace is the most flexible card; in this solitaire it is the strongest. At the end, only the four Aces are supposed to be left.