Card values, soft and hard hands

You are dealt an ace and a six.

Leoformer dealer · rules and maths

I dealt this game before I taught it, and the quietest mistake at a table looks like this: the player makes the right move for a hand he is not holding. Every decision in blackjack is a decision about a number, so the number has to be the right one before anything else.

What each card is worth

You are trying to finish with a higher total than the dealer, without going over 21. The whole game sits in that one sentence, so the first skill to have is adding up the cards in your hand, quickly and without a mistake.

Cards come out of a shoe (the box the dealer deals from, holding several decks shuffled together), and four of the thirteen kinds put ten on your hand. The rest of this track keeps coming back to that.

The ace: two numbers at once

The ace is the only card with two values, and the choice between one and eleven is yours, not the dealer’s. There is nothing to announce: your hand is worth whichever of the two numbers suits you, and the dealer reads your hand the same way.

Leoformer dealer · rules and maths

One habit does the whole job of reading a hand, and I ask every beginner to make it automatic: the eleven question. Three steps, below.

1. Step 1Count the ace as one and add the hand up.An ace and a six: 1 + 6 is 7.
2. Step 2Add ten to that total.7 + 10 is 17.
3. Step 3Is the new total 21 or under?Yes: the ace can be eleven, the hand has two totals, and the hand is soft. No: the ace is one, the hand has one total, and the hand is hard.

Soft and hard: those two words carry the rest of the track.

Hard is not only “a hand with no ace”. An ace that can no longer be eleven makes a hard hand too, whether the hand holds two cards or five.

Your turn. You hold an ace, an ace and a nine: three cards, two of them aces.

About one starting hand in 7 has an ace in it, so you will be asking the eleven question often.

When a soft hand turns hard

Every card that lands on a soft hand asks the eleven question again. Nobody at the table announces that the hand has turned hard; noticing that the ace has dropped to one is your job.

The felt says 17 before the ten and 17 after the ten, and the soft 17 and the hard 17 are not the same hand. Telling a soft 17 from a hard 17 is the whole skill of this lesson, and the habit that does it is small: count again after every card, and ask the eleven question each time.

The ace rescues a hand, too. A hand with an ace in it is over 21 only when it is over with the ace counted as one, because the ace can always drop to one when eleven no longer fits.

Blackjack, and what is not one

One hand at this table has a name of its own: the blackjack (twenty-one on your first two cards: the one hand a table pays at a rate of its own). A blackjack is an ace and a ten-value card as your first two cards: an ace beside a ten, a jack, a queen or a king.

A blackjack is worth knowing on sight because of what a blackjack pays. Some tables pay a blackjack less than 3 to 2, and what the lower rate costs you is lesson 3.11.

Two hands of 21 that are not blackjacks

Twenty-one built from three cards or more is a good hand, and it pays the ordinary 1 to 1. Against a blackjack, a 21 built from three cards or more is the lower hand.

Twenty-one on a split hand. A pair can be split into two hands, and each of the two hands is played on its own. An ace and a ten-value card on one of those hands is 21 on two cards, and it is still not a blackjack, so it pays the ordinary 1 to 1. How a pair is split is lesson 3.3; which pairs are worth splitting is lesson 3.9.

What a misread costs

Leoformer dealer · rules and maths

A wrong reading sends you to the wrong row of the strategy chart you are about to learn. The chart is only as good as the number you bring to it.

Two misreads of a 17 against a dealer nine. The amounts are averages per hand on an example bet of $10, not a suggested bet. Amounts are in Canadian dollars.

Neither amount tells you what to do with a 17: what to do with a hard total is lesson 3.6, and what to do with a soft total is lesson 3.8. What the two amounts say is narrower, and it comes first: which row of the chart you play from is settled by how you read the hand, before you decide anything.

1. On every hand0.53%of the bet stays with the house on average at a six-deck table paying 3 to 2 on a blackjack, even when every hand is played by the full chart.
2. In an hour70 handsat $10 a hand: the pace in the Las Vegas Strip rating table.
3. The house’s share of that hour$3.68on average, before a single hand has been read wrong.

The house keeps its edge; the chart only makes it smaller. Reading your hand right does not turn the house’s share around. Reading your hand right keeps you from paying more than that share.

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

One thing before you go looking for the good hands. A blackjack comes about once in 21 hands, and waiting for a blackjack is not a plan: an evening of waiting is still an evening of paying the house its share on every hand. Decide your limit and your time before the first hand, and keep both the limit and the time; Game plan walks you through it.

The lesson on one card

That is the lesson. Here it is on one card: print it or keep it on your phone, and ask the dealer before you use it at the table.

Practice table

A hand lies on the felt, three readings are offered, and after each answer comes the counting the right reading rests on. Level 1 is the hand as it is dealt; level 2 adds cards, which is where a soft hand stops being soft; level 3 is more than one ace. Level 4 puts the dealer’s card beside yours and says what reading the hand wrong is worth. The lesson is one run: every square on the strip below is one hand of the lesson, and all the squares are there from the start. Only your first answer on each hand counts, and when a level’s squares are full the next level begins by itself. Nothing is bet here.

Check yourself

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

Five quick ones. Pick an answer, then check it. No timer, no points: just whether it stuck.

Where to play, and further reading

19+ (18+ in AB, MB, QC) · Play responsibly · help, day or night: Gambling Support BC 1-888-795-6111, 24 hours

A six is a six at every table, and so is a soft hand: what the cards are worth and what a hand is called do not change from one table to the next. What does change from table to table — what a blackjack pays, how many decks are in the shoe — is lesson 3.11.

Further reading

• Rules of Play for Table Games: Blackjack · British Columbia Lottery Corporation (BCLC)The rules this track follows section by section: six decks, the dealer on soft 17, doubling, splitting and surrender.
• Game rules: Blackjack · Loto-Québec (Société des casinos du Québec)Québec’s rules: one to eight decks, a face-down dealer card, and the soft-17 rule left to the sign at the table.
• Playing Blackjack · Fallsview Casino Resort and Casino NiagaraOne Ontario operator’s own booklet, including both blackjack payouts and both dealer rules it may post.
• Blackjack: how to play · OLG PlaySmartOntario’s beginner page: the moves, the hand signals it describes, and what insurance is.
• Know the game: Blackjack · Casinos Regina & Moose Jaw (SaskGaming)A Saskatchewan operator on what the chart does and does not do, and where to pick one up in the building.
• Blackjack basics · Wizard of OddsWhat three common ways of playing blackjack without the chart cost, on that author’s own table.

How it’s worked out