How Blackjack Decks change the House Edge

Most blackjack casino strategy involves studying various situations where you need to hit, stand, split and double down to lower the house edge. As you can imagine, perfecting blackjack strategy isn’t always the easiest thing for many players. But there are some fairly simple things you can do to lower the house such as looking for games that use less decks.

Less decks means a smaller casino house edge, which we all know is great when you’re trying to make the big bucks in blackjack. Keeping favorable rules in mind (dealer stands on soft 17, 3:2 blackjack payouts), here are the different house edges for each amount of decks:

As you can see, there isn’t a huge house edge drop from 8 decks to 2 decks; however, when you get down to single deck blackjack, the player can actually gain an advantage at the casino, under the right rules! Unfortunately, the house doesn’t like giving away their edge, so you need to look out for the various rule changes that are commonly implemented.

Now that you know single deck blackjack offers the best chance for players to win, you obviously need to run out and find these casino games, right? In theory, yes, but in reality, simply finding single deck blackjack doesn’t guarantee you of making profits because you’ll probably have to deal with a number of unfavorable rule changes.

The most common rule change is reducing blackjack payouts from 3:2 to 6:5. Now this might sound harmless, but just changing the blackjack payouts takes the 0.182% player edge away, and gives the casino a 1.21% edge. This actually makes single deck blackjack much worse than 8 deck blackjack (with favorable rules).

Even if the house doesn’t change the blackjack payouts, they may allow the dealer to hit on a soft 17, which moves the aforementioned player’s edge to a 0.008% house edge. This still makes the one deck game worth playing, but it’s rare that you’ll find casino blackjack offered this way. The overall point is to keep an eye on the rule changes no matter how many decks are offered because they could have a drastic effect on your profits.

You can take the fact that less decks equals a lower house edge and run with it. However, some of you may be interested as to why less decks is better for the casino player. Now this is a long and complicated subject that involves lots of mathematics, so we’ll just skip the nerdy part and cut to the basics.

The main reason why lower decks are better for players is because you can get blackjacks easier. For example, if you receive an ace first in single deck blackjack, there is a greater opportunity for you to get a 10-value card and complete the natural blackjack; in short, you have a 4.82% chance of getting a blackjack in the single deck casino game. However, if you add another deck to the equation, the chances of you getting a natural blackjack are now 4.77% because another full set of cards have been injected. And the chances for a natural blackjack keep decreasing as you move up in deck amounts.

Moving along, less decks means less of a chance for the dealer to get a blackjack in the same hand that you do. In single deck blackjack, the casino dealer will receive a blackjack in the same hand as you 3.7% of the time. Add one more deck to the shoe, and the dealer’s chances of duplicating your blackjack increase to 4.2%. In the end, it’s definitely worth increasing your chances to get those blackjack payouts, rather than watching the dealer also get a blackjack and cause a push.

Above all, remember that anytime you can find less blackjack decks used, coupled with favorable rules, you should be sitting down at this table!