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Blackjack chart: basic strategy, the rules, and how it plays on a phone

Blackjack is the one casino game where your decisions change the number. Play every hand the way the chart below says and the house keeps about half a cent on the dollar; guess instead, and it keeps ten to twenty times that. Basic strategy, cheat sheet, strategy card: all three names point at the same grid, and it is on this page in full.

0.5%BEST AVAILABLE EDGE
C$0.50PER C$100 STAKED
220ROUNDS AN HOUR ON A PHONE
7.4%WORST BET ON THE SAME FELT

Assumes four to eight decks, dealer stands on soft 17, double after split allowed, blackjack pays 3:2. Change the ruleset and every figure on this page moves.

Every bet, with what it costs

BetPaysHouse edgeNote
Playing the chart 3:2 on blackjack 0.5% Every decision correct, every hand
Playing by instinct 3:2 on blackjack 2.5% What most hands actually cost
Blackjack paying 6:5 6:5 on blackjack 1.9% Same chart, worse payout. Leave the table
Insurance 2:1 7.4% A side bet on the dealer. Never take it
Perfect Pairs side bet up to 25:1 6% Side bets are where the table makes its money

Cheapest and most expensive on the same table are 0.5% and 7.4%. Nothing about the room changes between those two rows; the only difference is which one you tapped.

What an hour costs

C$1C$1 A ROUND, PLAYED CORRECTLY
C$6C$5 A ROUND, PLAYED CORRECTLY
C$81C$5 A ROUND ON THE WORST BET
220ROUNDS IN SIXTY MINUTES

Stake, times rounds an hour, times the edge. That is the whole formula and pace is the term people forget: the same game dealt twice as fast costs twice as much. The full table across every game is in what an hour costs.

One hand, right now

HAND CHECKER

Timer running and no time to read a grid? Pick what you are holding and what the dealer is showing. Same 280 cells as the tables below, one at a time.

Dealer shows

Hit

Taking a card here loses less often than standing on it does. That is the whole argument.

Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored. It reads the same arrays that print the grid below, so the two cannot say different things.

The chart

Columns are the dealer's up card. Find your hand on the left, read across. 28 rows, 280 cells, and it is the whole of basic strategy. It comes in three tables because an ace counts as one or eleven depending on what it would do to you, and a pair is a decision that a running total cannot express.

Hard totals

Hand2345678910A
8 or less HHHHHHHHHH
9 HDDDDHHHHH
10 DDDDDDDDHH
11 DDDDDDDDDH
12 HHSSSHHHHH
13 SSSSSHHHHH
14 SSSSSHHHHH
15 SSSSSHHHHH
16 SSSSSHHHHH
17 or more SSSSSSSSSS

Soft totals, an ace counted as eleven

Hand2345678910A
A,2 HHHDDHHHHH
A,3 HHHDDHHHHH
A,4 HHDDDHHHHH
A,5 HHDDDHHHHH
A,6 HDDDDHHHHH
A,7 SDsDsDsDsSSHHH
A,8 SSSSSSSSSS
A,9 SSSSSSSSSS

Pairs

Hand2345678910A
2,2 PPPPPPHHHH
3,3 PPPPPPHHHH
4,4 HHHPPHHHHH
5,5 DDDDDDDDHH
6,6 PPPPPHHHHH
7,7 PPPPPPHHHH
8,8 PPPPPPPPPP
9,9 PPPPPSPPSS
10,10 SSSSSSSSSS
A,A PPPPPPPPPP
H HitS StandD Double, hit if you cannotDs Double, stand if you cannotP Split

The three cells that move with the felt

Everything above assumes the dealer stands on a soft seventeen, which is what the felt says on most Canadian tables. Where it says the dealer hits it, three plays change and nothing else does. Printing a second full grid for three cells would be theatre.

HandDealer showsStands on soft 17Hits soft 17
Hard 11 ace Hit Double
A,7 (soft 18) 2 Stand Double, stand if you cannot
A,8 (soft 19) 6 Stand Double, stand if you cannot

The rule is printed on the table itself, usually under the payout line, and it is worth about two tenths of a percent to you. Deck count moves the grid by less than that and is not worth a second chart either.

How a hand actually goes

Two cards to you, face up. Two to the dealer, one of them hidden. Court cards are ten, an ace is eleven until eleven busts you, then it is one. Beat the dealer without going over twenty-one and you get paid even money; do it with an ace and a ten on the first two cards and you get paid three to two, assuming the table still offers three to two.

Then you choose. Hit takes another card. Stand ends your turn. Double doubles the bet and gives you exactly one more card. Split turns a pair into two hands with a second bet behind it. That is the whole game, and every one of those choices has a correct answer that depends only on your total and the dealer's up card.

The dealer has no choices at all. They draw to sixteen and stand on seventeen, and whether they stand on a soft seventeen is printed on the felt. Standing on soft seventeen is better for you by about two tenths of a percent, which sounds like nothing and is not nothing over a few hundred hands.

Why the chart looks strange in places

Hit a sixteen against a dealer ten and you will bust more often than not. Stand on it and you lose more often than that. The chart picks the least bad of two bad options, which is what it is doing every time it tells you to do something that feels wrong.

Splitting eights against a ten is the famous one. Sixteen is the worst hand in the game, so the chart breaks it into two hands that each start on eight. Both are still losers. Two small losses beat one big one, and that is the entire argument.

Never take insurance. It is priced as if a ten came up one time in three, and there are sixteen tens in a fifty-two card deck. The gap between those two numbers is the seven percent the bet costs you, and it costs it whether or not you are holding a blackjack.

Five dollars or twenty-eight, same hour

A live table on a phone deals two hundred and twenty hands an hour once you stop waiting for other players, which the solo tables and the pre-decision tables have mostly stopped making you do. At C$5 a hand that is C$1,100 through the table in sixty minutes.

Half a percent of C$1,100 is five dollars and change. That is the price of an hour played correctly. The same hour played on instinct runs closer to twenty-eight dollars, and the difference is a piece of paper in your camera roll.

Learning it in the order that pays

Nobody memorises 280 cells in a sitting and nobody needs to. Most of what you get dealt is boring: seventeen or better always stands, eight or less always hits, and a pair of tens is not a decision however much the table wants it to be. Those go in on the first evening and never move.

Then learn the stiffs, because they come up constantly and they are where the guessing money goes. Thirteen through sixteen against a dealer two to six, stand. The same totals against a seven or better, hit. Twelve is the exception and it is worth learning as one: it only stands against a four, five or six.

The doubles are three lines and no more than that. Eleven doubles against anything except an ace, ten doubles against two through nine, nine doubles against three through six. They are the only spots in the game where you get to put more money in with the odds pointing your way, so they earn the memorising.

Pairs last, because they turn up least. Aces and eights always split. Tens and fives never do. Everything else in the pair table is a case you can look up in the checker above while the timer runs, and by the time you have looked it up four times you will not be looking it up again.

Playing it online in Canada

Two products carry the name in a Canadian lobby and they behave nothing alike. Software blackjack deals instantly against a shuffled shoe, costs a dollar or less a hand, and waits as long as you want on every decision. Live blackjack is a table streamed from a studio with a real dealer, a real shoe and a timer that does not care that you are on a bus.

The maths is the same in both. The chart on this page is correct for either, and the house edge does not move because a human is turning the cards. What moves is your hands per hour, which is the term that decides what the evening costs.

Where you are decides what is open to you. Ontario has a regulated private market alongside the provincial site; the rest of the country runs its own provincial operation and the private operators serve it from offshore licences. The per-province picture is on where you are, and the apps that carry live tables are on the app board.

Searching in French gets you the same tables. Nothing about the grid changes with the lobby language, and the account setting that switches the interface does not switch the ruleset, so check the felt rather than the menu.

On a phone

  • The chart runs to 280 cells and none of them fit on a phone screen at once. Screenshot the three tables and keep them in an album, not a browser tab that reloads.
  • Live tables run a decision timer, usually twelve to fifteen seconds. That is enough to check a chart once and not enough to think about it.
  • Portrait live blackjack puts the hit and stand buttons under a thumb. Turn the phone and they slide to the far edge, which is how mis-taps happen at speed.
  • Turn off the auto-rebet toggle. It is on by default in most builds and it is the single fastest way to play sixty hands you did not decide to play.

Where the tables are

Bet99 Casino 600 live tables 3 taps to withdraw ToonieBet 460 live tables 4 taps to withdraw Casino Days 400 live tables no app, browser only JustCasino 300 live tables 6 taps to withdraw

40 of the operators on our board carry live tables, 5900 between them. More tables mostly means a shorter wait at your stake level rather than a better product.

Blackjack questions people actually type

What is the house edge in blackjack?

0.5% at four to eight decks, dealer stands on soft 17, double after split allowed, blackjack pays 3:2. That is C$0.50 for every C$100 staked, and the worst bet on the same felt costs 7.4%.

What is a blackjack cheat sheet?

It is the grid above. Cheat sheet, strategy card, basic strategy chart: three names, one thing, and none of it is cheating.

Every play in it falls out of counting a deck of cards. That is why a casino gift shop will happily sell you one on a keyring. Knowing the correct play does not beat the game, it just stops you paying extra for guessing.

Do I have to memorise the whole chart?

No, and almost nobody does, including people who play it well. A grid sitting in your camera roll answers in one swipe, which is what a live dealer's timer actually allows and thinking about it is not.

The hard totals go in on their own after a couple of hundred hands because they come up constantly. Pairs take longest, which is fine, because pairs turn up least.

Am I allowed to use a chart at an online table?

Yes. Basic strategy is published mathematics and no operator's terms have anything to say about you reading it mid-hand.

Software tables wait for you as long as you want. Live tables give you twelve to fifteen seconds, so the only practical rule is that the chart has to already be open before the cards land.

What is the difference between a blackjack calculator and a blackjack simulator?

A calculator answers one hand. You feed it your total and the dealer's up card and it gives you the play, which is exactly what the hand checker near the top of this page does.

A simulator deals hands at you and tells you afterwards whether the button you hit matched the chart. That is how a lookup turns into a reflex.

A free table plus the grid gets you to the same place for nothing, just slower. The free tables page covers what a demo is and is not good for.

Where can I play blackjack free with nothing to install?

Any lobby with a demo mode runs software blackjack in the browser, no account, no download, no store listing.

That is what people are after when they type blackjack unblocked or 247 blackjack: a build that opens in a tab on whatever device is in front of them. The free cut of this ruleset is at free blackjack.

Anything with money attached is 19+ across Canada and 18+ in Alberta, Manitoba and Quebec, and the demo is where the age gate is not.

Is online blackjack legal in Canada?

Every province runs its own gambling operation and blackjack is on all of them. Ontario goes further and licenses private operators to serve players inside the province directly.

Elsewhere the private sites people actually use hold offshore licences. The Criminal Code section everyone argues about is aimed at whoever conducts the game, not at the person placing the bet.

Which of those applies to you depends on your postcode, and that is broken down province by province at where you are.

What is live blackjack and does it cost more?

A real dealer, a real shoe, a camera, and buttons drawn over the stream. Same rules, same chart, same edge as the software version.

What changes is the clock. A live table gets through roughly 220 hands an hour and every decision runs on a timer, so an hour of it puts a lot more money across the felt than an hour of tapping through software at your own pace.

That pace is the whole cost story. The percentage never moves; the amount you run through it does.

Which blackjack book should I read?

The part that changes your money is the chart on this page and it costs nothing. Books go past it into card counting, which is a genuinely different skill.

Counting also does not work against a software shoe that reshuffles every hand, which is what a phone deals you. The famous title is Edward Thorp's Beat the Dealer, which put counting into print in the 1960s.

Read it because the history is good. Do not read it expecting an edge on a handset.

Is Blackjack Ballroom a kind of blackjack?

No. It is a casino brand that happens to carry the word, which is why the search lands on pages about the game instead.

We have not installed it, deposited into it or withdrawn from it, so we have nothing measured to tell you and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Everything we have actually taken apart sits on the app board.

Does this chart work for single deck?

Close enough that you will never feel the difference. One and two deck games shift a handful of cells and the whole adjustment is worth a few hundredths of a percent, which is smaller than one bad guess an hour costs you.

There is a bigger thing to check on those tables. Where a natural pays 6:5 instead of 3:2 that is worth about 1.4%, and no amount of deck counting buys it back.

What makes a good blackjack table on a phone?

Three things, in order: 3:2 on a natural, a ruleset printed where you can read it, and a build that holds the phone upright.

Upright matters more than it sounds. Turn the phone and hit and stand end up at the far edge of the screen, which is where mis-taps come from once the timer is running.

Check the payout line before the first hand. A table paying 6:5 costs more than any welcome offer is worth.