Odds Of Dealer Blackjack
When you play blackjack, you have some incomplete information to base your playing decisions on. You know the value of your two cards and you know the value of the dealer’s up card. You don’t know what the dealer’s hole card is and you don’t know what the next card out of the shoe will be. However, if you use basic strategy when you play, you can make an accurate decision based on just the information that you do know.
Extra Rules Affecting Blackjack Odds European No-Hole-Card Rule. Some blackjack variations are played with a hole card that is dealt to the dealer only after all the players have played their hands. This rule affects player strategy when playing against dealer up 10 or an Ace. The dealer will bust more often with certain up cards than with others. Take a look at the chart below. You will see that the worst cards for the dealer are the 5 and 6, followed closely by the 4. When the dealer is showing a 5 or a 6, they have a 42 percent chance of busting and a 40 percent chance when they have a 4 showing.
Basic Strategy
The dealer is almost twice as likely to bust when they have a 2 through 6. This also show that a common phrase heard at blackjack tables, “a 2 is the dealer’s ace“, is not even close to being true as the two bust 3 times as often as an ace. Chalk that up as another myth. I practice blackjack strategy and counting with the ODDcase app for. Looking at the blackjack chart, the blackjack strategy card tells us to stand whenever you have 17 points or more in your hand, regardless of what the dealer is showing for an up card. Reduce the value of your hand by one point to 16, and the chart says to stand when the dealer’s up card is a 6 or lower. Dealer's Bust-Out Rate If you've ever been undecided about whether to hit or stand in a game of blackjack when the dealer's upcard is a 'bust card,' learning about the dealer's.
Basic blackjack strategy is based on the mathematics of the game. It has been tested and refined through computer simulations. When it is followed correctly, it reduces the house edge to the minimum, which is usually about one-half of a percent. When you use basic strategy, you make your decision to hit, stand, or double down based on your two cards and the dealer's up card. Many players wonder what percentage of time will the dealer bust based on their up card. (Whenever your hand or the dealer’s hand goes over the total of 21, it is called a bust.)
The dealer will bust more often with certain up cards than with others. Take a look at the chart below. You will see that the worst cards for the dealer are the 5 and 6, followed closely by the 4. When the dealer is showing a 5 or a 6, they have a 42 percent chance of busting and a 40 percent chance when they have a 4 showing. This is why you double down more often when the dealer is showing a 4, 5, or 6.
The cards where the dealer is least likely to bust are the Ace, 10, and 9. When the dealer has one of these cards showing, they also have another advantage since the player has to act first. According to basic strategy, a player with a hand of less than 17 will need to take a hit when the dealer is showing a 7, 8, 9, 10, or ace. If the player busts, he loses the hand even if the dealer also busts, so the percentage of times the house will win is greater than just the bust percentage shown in the chart.
Play Correctly
You will make more money when the dealer is showing a card that will allow you to double down, however, you must follow the rules of basic strategy. Many novice players will double down with a hand of 7 or 8 against a dealer showing an up card of 5 or 6. This is not correct and even though the dealer will bust 42 percent of the time, you will lose more money if you don’t play according to basic strategy.
Knowing the dealer’s bust percentage is useful information but it should just be used to confirm the decisions you make when you play basic strategy. If you are unsure of the correct plays, you should memorize the basic strategy chart or bring one to the table with you. This way, you will be playing blackjack with the lowest house edge possible.
Blackjack Dealer Bust Percentages
Odds are everywhere you look. Seriously. Odds are in a casino, your workplace, your day-to-day live and habits, your marriage and where in the world you live.
Don’t believe me? Take a look for yourself:
- Odds of having twins (21st century) – 3 in 100 or 3%
- Odds of getting a divorce – 40 to 50%
- Odds of being stuck by lightning – 1 in 5,000 or 1 in 700,000 in any given year
- Odds of being audited by the IRS – .4% if you make less than $200,000 / year
- Odds of being dealt a blackjack – About 4.83%
Odds are just the likelihood that something will happen. As a blackjack player you deal with this all the time.
Lets look at a couple real examples to show you what I mean.
Here are the odds of you busting your hand, depending on what you were dealt:
- 21 – 100%
- 20 – 92%
- 19 – 85%
- 18 – 77%
- 17 – 69%
- 16 – 62%
- 15 – 58%
- 14 – 56%
- 13 – 39%
- 12 – 31%
- <11 – 0%
Odds of Being Dealt Specific Hands
Here are the probabilities for being dealt a specific hand:
- Blackjack – 4.8%
- Standing Hand (17-20) – 30%
- Decision Hand – (1-16) – 38.7%
- No Bust – 26.5%
Here are the odds for the final hands that the dealer will make:
- Natural 21 – 4.82%
- 21 (3+ cards) – 7.36%
- 20 – 17.58%
- 19 – 13.48%
- 18 – 13.81%
- 17 – 14.58%
- 16 – 28.36%
Dealer vs. Player Odds
Finally, here are the odds of the dealer busting based on their up card:
- 2 – 35.30%
- 3 – 37.56%
- 4 – 40.28%
- 5 – 42.89%
- 6 – 42.08%
- 7 – 25.99%
- 8 – 23.86%
- 9 – 23.34%
- J,Q,K – 21.43%
- A – 11.65%
Of these examples, this is the most useful. Notice what hands the dealer is most likely to bust with. The dealer will most often bust with 4, 5 or 6, followed by 2 and 3.
The odds above are static. There’s nothing you can do to change them. However, you can find ways to improve your odds so that you lose fewer hands and less money. And the less money you lose, the more you can keep to play more blackjack.
Here’s what you can do to improve your odds in blackjack:
- Use basic blackjack strategy. Without basic strategy you’re playing at an 8% disadvantage. With strategy, however, the odds increase significantly. You’ll be playing at only .5 to 1.5% disadvantage.
- Find the best games. The rules make all the difference. For example, if you play a 6:5 blackjack game you’re adding a 1.39% disadvantage. If the dealer hits soft 17 that’s another .18%. However, it’s possible to find games where the player is paid 3:2 for blackjacks and the dealer stands on soft 17. So find those games. Also be careful about which blackjack variation you play. The best games to play are blackjack, Spanish 21, Vegas Strip BJ and Blackjack Switch.
- Avoid side bets. Side bets look exciting, because for a nominal amount you could possibly win a huge jackpot — worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars. The problem is that the odds against winning can be anywhere from 2-40%.
- Avoid wives tales. There are a lot of bad strategies like never busting (never hit a 12+), mimicking the dealer and assume that the dealer has a 10 in the whole (with ace up). The problem with using any of these strategies is that they increase the house edge from 3 to 10 percent.
You can do other things, too, like count cards or read books (usually a mix of basic strategy, card counting and general how-to’s for casino blackjack). However, you’ll improve your odds at winning at blackjack just by following my suggestions above.
Understanding the Long Run – Sample Size and Variance
I wanted to finish up this article with a brief explanation of odds, and how they work over the long run. You see, I think a lot of people will see the numbers above and get confused when they don’t match their own stats. In other words, someone might go to the casino play 500 hands of blackjack, and wonder why they didn’t get 24 natural blackjacks, or the other way around, why they got 42.
The thing is, odds and statistics are all about the long run. Long run usually meaning sample size, or the total number of hands (or games) played.
What that means is that over a significant sample size, hundreds of thousands or even millions of hands, the number of times you’ll receive a blackjack is about 4.82%. The more hands you play the truer this will become.
The reason why odds don’t match up in smaller sessions, say over 500 hands, is because of variance. There’s a technical term and definition for variance, but I’ll just give you my version; variance is the ups and downs you experience on your way to the long term (expected) results.
Mike Caro, a poker player and author, puts it this way:
A measure of the spread of statistical distribution about its mean or centre.
Odds Of Matching The Dealer In Blackjack
That means in a short time frame, it’s possible to experience more drastic odds. You might win or lose more than you’re supposed to. It also explains why people can go into a casino, not use basic strategy and win 3x as much as what they walked in with. The cards ran in their favor — they experienced a positive streak of variance.
Wizard Of Odds Blackjack
So that’s the gist of it. So the next time you walk into the casino and have a wild swing one way or another, you know that that’s not normal, and that in the long run you’ll be closer to break-even so long as you stick to basic strategy — the plan with the best odds.