Blackjack odds Explained

You’ve probably noticed that there are a few different versions of blackjack available at the LeoVegas online casino, but they all have similar rules and the same basic objective: get a hand that adds up to 21, or as near as possible without going over.

In blackjack, players go up against the banker, and the aim is to end up with a blackjack. That is a hand of cards whose face values add up to 21. If you don’t get under 21, but you get closer to it than the dealer, you win. Regular cards from two to 10 carry their face value, and all picture cards have a value of 10. An ace can be worth either one or 11, and you can switch between the two during any blackjack game.

Your odds of winning in blackjack are pretty good whether playing online, in the live casino lobby, or even in a brick-and-mortar casino. It has one of the lowest house edges of any table game, but the version you’re playing, the number of decks in play, and the strategies you use will change the odds and determine what your final payout will be if you get a winning hand.

Blackjack house edge odds

So, what are the odds of winning a hand in blackjack? They’re actually pretty good. You’re probably aware that ‘the house always wins’, and that’s due to something called the ‘house edge’. The odds in any game are always at least slightly in favour of the casino, because casinos are businesses and need to make money.

With blackjack, the house edge is pretty low, usually around 0.5% with a perfect strategy. However, this will vary depending on the variation you play, and the side bets you place. The house edge goes up, for example, if there are more decks in play. Overall, though, in blackjack perfect strategy odds give the player about a 46% chance of winning any given hand.

Blackjack 6-deck odds with a perfect strategy

The chances of getting a blackjack are higher when fewer decks are used. With one deck in play, the probability of getting a blackjack is 4.827%. It goes down very slightly with every deck added, and at six decks, the probability is 4.749%.

These 6-deck blackjack odds assume that a perfect strategy is being used, where you’re following the odds rather than following your gut. A perfect strategy involves following a strict set of guidelines regarding when you stick, when you twist (hit), and when you split, double down or surrender.

For example, when playing 6-deck blackjack, you should always hit if you have a hand of five to eight, consider doubling down on a hand of between nine and 11, and stick if you have 17 or more.

Blackjack odds of busting on each total

Bust Chance Table

While the above is a good guideline chart, your blackjack odds payout does also depend on the dealer’s cards. For example, if the dealer has a low card (six or under) showing, the player’s chances of success are significantly higher.

If you’re looking to find out the same statistics for the dealer, check out our blog on How likely is the Dealer to bust in Blackjack?.

Trickiest hands to win based on the odds

Some hands are harder to win, statistically, than others, in any version of blackjack. Hands with aces are generally desirable because you can count the ace as a one or an 11 depending on which other cards you’re dealt.

The most common hand to be holding after the first two cards are dealt is a ‘decision hand’, which is a hand of 16 or less. It’s called this because a perfect strategy involves always sticking when you have 17 or more, so there’s no decision to be made. With any hand over 11, there’s a chance that you’ll go bust if you hit, so a hand between 12 and 16 is a tricky one.

To make things more complicated, the dealer’s up card also matters. When you’re holding 16 and the dealer has a 10, you’ll have just a 23% chance of winning if you twist. Sticking to a perfect strategy means that you may still lose individual hands, but based on the odds, you’ll still have as good a chance as possible of winning overall, especially over a longer playing session.

How splitting and doubling down impacts odds

If you’re dealt a matching pair as your first two cards, you can choose to split them and play them as two independent hands, placing an extra bet on the second hand. This can improve your odds of winning, allowing you to split weak pairs such as two eights (which give you one of those tricky 16 hands) into two potentially stronger hands.

As we can see in the table above, a 16 has a 62% chance of sending you bust if you twist, so ‘resetting’ to two hands of eight is generally a good idea. You can also split a pair of aces. You’ll only get one more card for each hand if you do. However, there are 16 different cards per pack with a face value of 10 (plus four nines and four eights), so a blackjack or another high-scoring hand is statistically feasible – depending on what the dealer is holding.

Doubling down can also impact the odds in blackjack. You can decide to double down after your first two cards are dealt. It involves increasing your wager by an additional amount that must be either the same as the original bet or less. Whether this is a good or bad strategy will depend on what you are holding and what the dealer is holding.

Obviously, doubling is only a good idea if you are statistically likely to win. Some would say your odds of winning two blackjack hands in a row are the same as winning one, as every game you play has the same odds, but probability statistics suggest otherwise. As with other table games this depends on various factors, including your playing strategy, but let’s use a basic example to show how you would calculate the odds.

To demonstrate the way that you would calculate the probability of winning multiple times, let’s take a standard blackjack game with the odds of winning being around 46%. The chance of a winning streak in five hands could then be calculated as 0.46 to the power of five, which is 0.0206%, or roughly 1 in 49. With the same calculation, the chance of winning 10 hands in a row would be 0.00042%, or roughly 1 in 2,357.

Odds of losing multiple hands of blackjack in a row

To work out the odds of losing multiple hands of blackjack in a row, you would simply have to reverse the above calculations. Assuming that the odds of losing are 54%, you would calculate the odds of losing five times in a row as 0.54 to the power of five, resulting in 0.0459%. With the same calculation, the chance of losing 10 hands in a row would be 0.002108%.

While it can be interesting to look at the numbers in this way, statistical probabilities don’t mean much when it comes to what happens to an individual while sitting at the blackjack table and certainly don’t guarantee anything either way.

While your odds of winning 10 hands in a row (or, of course, losing 10 hands in a row) are low, it could happen. Blackjack enthusiasts suggest that it’s ‘hard’ to win 10 games in a row, or even that it’s ‘almost impossible’ to lose 10 games in a row, but the terminology they’re using isn’t quite right. They aren’t hard or impossible – they’re just statistically very unlikely.

The best way to beat those blackjack odds over time is to adopt a perfect strategy and play according to the probabilities, rather than betting on a whim or using ‘gut instinct’. Join us today to play blackjack, and a huge range of other casino games.