You have 16. The dealer shows 10.

A blackjack table that behaves like a real one. Six-deck shoe, cut card, the dealer peeking for blackjack, insurance offered at the right moment, splits, doubles, surrender, and payouts that follow the rules printed on the table.

The chips are counters. Nothing is paid in, nothing is paid out, and there is nothing to win. The bankroll exists because blackjack decisions only make sense when a bet is on the table — a strategy chart is abstract until you feel the difference between doubling and not.

It is built for one purpose: learning to play a hand correctly, quickly, without thinking. If you are going to sit at a real table anyway, knowing the correct play is the difference between a game with a small house edge and a game with a large one.

Blackjack is a race to get closer to 21 than the dealer without going over. You play against the dealer only, never against the other players.

Card values

2 through 10	Face value.
Jack, Queen, King	Ten.
Ace	Eleven, or one if eleven would bust you. A hand holding an ace counted as eleven is called soft — soft 17 is ace plus six, and it cannot bust with one more card.

The deal

You get two cards face up. The dealer gets one face up and one face down. Ace or ten showing, and the dealer checks the hole card for blackjack before you play. An ace plus a ten-value card on the first two cards is a blackjack and beats any hand that reaches 21 with three cards or more.

Your options

Hit	Take another card. Repeat until you stand or go over 21.
Stand	Keep what you have and pass to the dealer.
Double	Double your bet, take exactly one more card, and stop. Only on your first two cards.
Split	With two cards of the same value, separate them into two hands and match your bet on the second. Split aces get one card each and no more.
Surrender	Give up the hand and get half your bet back. Only before you take a card, and only where the table allows it.
Insurance	Offered when the dealer shows an ace: a side bet of half your stake that pays 2:1 if the dealer has blackjack. It is a bad bet. See below.

The dealer has no choices

This is the part people miss. The dealer follows a fixed rule: draw until reaching 17, then stop. Whether they must draw on a soft 17 depends on the table — it is printed on the felt, and it changes the correct play in a handful of spots. Everything the dealer does is mechanical, which is exactly why your side of the game can be solved.

What you get paid

Blackjack	3:2 — bet 10, collect 15
Any other win	1:1 — bet 10, collect 10
Push (tie)	Bet returned
Blackjack at a 6:5 table	Bet 10, collect 12

That last line is not a detail. A table paying 6:5 on blackjack takes roughly four times more from you over time than the same table paying 3:2, for exactly the same game. You can switch the rule on the practice table and watch the return column move.

Blackjack has the smallest house edge of any game on a casino floor, and that fact gets misused constantly. Here is the honest version.

Perfect play is still losing play

With a good six-deck game and flawless basic strategy, the house keeps somewhere around half a percent of everything you wager. Play badly — hunches, hot streaks, never splitting because it feels like doubling down on a bad hand — and that figure climbs past two percent. Basic strategy does not make you a winner. It makes you lose more slowly than almost anyone else at the table.

Insurance is not insurance

It is a separate bet on whether the dealer's hole card is a ten, offered at odds worse than the actual chance. Taking it every time costs you money every time. The table offers it because a real table offers it, and refusing it is a skill worth building.

Streaks are not real

The shoe has no memory of your last hand and no opinion about whether you are due. What does change with the cards already dealt is the composition of what remains, which is the entire premise of card counting — and counting is a slow, unglamorous grind that casinos are extremely good at spotting. The practice table shows you the running count if you want to see it, so you can check your mental arithmetic against the truth.

If the money part stops being fun

Nothing on this site involves real money, but the game it simulates does. In Switzerland the free, anonymous, round-the-clock helpline is 0800 040 080, in several languages, and there is more at sos-spielsucht.ch, sos-jeu.ch and careplay.ch.

The short version, in plain language. The full text lives on the policy page, and it is written to be read, not to be scrolled past.

• This site is not a casino, is not affiliated with one, and will never link to a gambling operator.
• No advertising. No sponsored placements. No affiliate links.
• No cookies, no analytics, no third-party scripts or fonts. Nothing on the page phones anywhere.
• Your bankroll and settings are saved in your own browser and never leave it. Clear your browser data and they are gone, including from my end, because they were never on my end.
• The site costs a domain and nothing else. If you want to chip in, there is a link — and if you do not, the site is identical.