Online Blackjack

There is something about blackjack that simply refuses to go out of fashion, and anybody who has sat at a table for even ten minutes will happily tell you the very same thing. It is you against the dealer. Nobody else at that table matters half as much as people seem to think, and the whole of the game comes down to one small question that you are asked to answer again and again, do you take another card, or do you sit tight with the hand you are already holding. That is it. That is honestly the entire game. And at TheOnlineCasino™ you get to answer that question as many times as you please, from your own sofa, from the back seat of a bus, from wherever it is that you happen to be sitting when the mood for a hand or two comes over you.

The old picture of blackjack, the smoky room and the green felt and the fellow in the waistcoat sliding cards across the table, that picture is lovely but it is not really the reality for most players any more. These days the table lives in your pocket. You do not need to book a taxi, you do not need to find a shirt with a collar on it, and you certainly do not need to wait for a seat to open up at a busy table on a Saturday night. Our blackjack section is open all hours, the seats are never full, and the dealer is ready the very second you are.

What you will find on this page is a proper walk through of how the game works, which blackjack titles are available to you here, what the side bets do to your odds, and how much of your stake the tables give back over the long run. Some of it you may already know. Some of it might be new. Either way, have a read before you sit down, because blackjack offers strategic players an engaging experience with its unique blend of skill and chance.

How online blackjack is played

The aim is not to reach twenty-one, and this is the single thing that new players get wrong most often. The aim is to finish with a hand worth more than the dealer's hand, without going over twenty-one. Those are two quite different goals and confusing them will cost you money over time.

You are dealt two cards. The dealer takes a card face up so you can see a part of what he is working with. From there the decision is yours, and everything hangs on what you choose to do next.

Here is roughly how a hand runs:

• You place your bet first, before a single card is dealt. Pick your stake using the chips at the bottom of the game screen and drop it into the betting circle.
• Two cards come to you, one comes to the dealer face up. Add your two cards together and see where you stand.
• Now you choose. Hit, and you receive another card. Stand, and you keep what you have. Double down, and you double your stake in exchange for exactly one more card, no more than that. Split, and if your two cards are a matching pair you can break them into two separate hands and play both.
• Once you are finished, the dealer plays out his own hand under fixed rules that he cannot bend, and the two hands get compared.

If your hand goes past twenty-one, you have gone bust and the hand is over for you right away, and it does not matter one bit what the dealer does afterwards. That is the harshest rule in the game and it is the reason the house holds an edge at all. If the dealer busts and you did not, every player still standing gets paid. And if you land an ace next to any card worth ten, that is a blackjack, the best hand there is, and it usually pays out at better odds than an ordinary win. Most tables you will come across pay three to two on a blackjack, though the exact terms sit inside each game's own info screen and that is the place to check before you commit your money.

What the cards are actually worth

This part is mercifully simple. Number cards are worth exactly what is printed on them, so a seven is seven and a four is four. The jack, the queen and the king are all worth ten apiece, which means there are far more ten-value cards floating around the shoe than people expect, sixteen of them in every fifty two.

The ace is the clever one. An ace counts as either one or eleven, whichever number happens to suit your hand better at that moment, and it switches on its own without you having to do a thing. So an ace with a six is a soft seventeen, on account of that hand being able to slide down to seven if you take another card and it pushes you too high. A soft hand can never bust on a single card, which is exactly why the strategy for playing soft hands looks so different to the strategy for hard ones.

The blackjack games waiting for you over here

Blackjack-One is the sensible place for most people to begin. It runs on the classic ruleset without any strange extras thrown on top, so the pace is steady and the decisions in front of you are the ones you would expect. If you are still finding your feet, or you simply want a table that does not shout at you, this is the one.

Blackjack Silver sits in the middle of the range and it is the table a lot of our regulars end up settling into. Same familiar rules, a slightly different room, a slightly different feel to it. Players who have been at this a while tend to have a favourite table for reasons they cannot always explain, and Silver picks up alot of that loyalty.

Blackjack Party is the odd one out and it is odd on purpose. It has two hosts rather than one, the music is on, and the whole thing is pitched at players who want the evening to feel like a night out instead of a maths exam. Stakes stay friendly and low, seven seats are on offer at the table, and the chat runs the whole time. If you have ever thought that blackjack felt a bit too serious for its own good, sit at this one.

Blackjack European follows the European ruleset, where the dealer takes only one card up front and does not draw his second card until your own hand is finished and settled. That one small change moves a few strategy decisions around, especially when the dealer is showing an ace or a ten. The Switch Studios version of European Blackjack runs on two decks rather than the usual eight and carries a theoretical return of 99.6%, which is about as generous as this game gets anywhere.

There are a few others sitting on the shelf besides those. Vegas Strip Blackjack follows the American style setup and it is a touch more generous on splitting than most, which tends to suit players who like having options in front of them. ReDeal Blackjack is worth a look if you want something with a twist laid over the standard rules, and its own game page sets out exactly how it differs before you put any money down. At the top end there are the live VIP rooms, Blackjack Grand VIP and Blackjack Platinum VIP, where the limits climb properly and the tables tend to be quieter.

That is not the whole of what we hold either. Our tables sit alongside a full room of online roulette, online baccarat, video poker and scratch cards, so if the cards go cold on you there is somewhere else to wander off to for twenty minutes.

Live dealer blackjack, with a real person dealing

Software blackjack is quick and it is quiet and it does the job. But a fair few players want to watch a human being pull the cards out of the shoe, and that is what our live casino is for.

The live tables are streamed from proper studios with real dealers, real cards and real chips, and you play through your screen in real time while everything unfolds in front of you. Evolution supply most of the tables you will meet, and thier games run on eight decks under European rules, with the dealer standing on seventeen whether that seventeen is hard or soft. Insurance is offered whenever the dealer's up card is an ace, paid at the traditional two to one.

There is a neat little feature on several of these tables called Pre-Decision, which lets you signal your move at the same moment as the first player rather than sitting there waiting your turn. It speeds a slow table up considerably. Evolution put the theoretical return on their standard Live Blackjack at 99.29%, which is a very healthy number by any measure, though it does assume you are playing the hand correctly rather than following a hunch.

The VIP tables are there for players who want higher limits, and the wider live room holds Lightning Roulette, Speed Baccarat, Dragon Tiger Live, Mini-Baccarat and Craps if you fancy a change of scenery between shoes.

Side bets, and whether they are worth your money

Nearly every blackjack table now offers a side bet or two, and it would be dishonest of us to pretend they are anything other than what they are. They are fun. They are also worse value than the main game, and you should know that going in rather than working it out afterwards.

Perfect Pairs pays out when your first two cards arrive as a pair, and the payout climbs depending on how well matched that pair happens to be. A mixed pair pays the least, a coloured pair pays more, and two identical cards of the same suit pays the most of the lot.

21+3 takes your first two cards, adds the dealer's face-up card, and looks at those three as a poker hand. A flush, a straight, three of a kind, a straight flush- each one carries its own payout and the top prize on that bet runs as high as 100:1 on Evolution's tables.

Insurance is the one worth talking about properly, since it is offered to you constantly and it dresses itself up as protection. When the dealer shows an ace you get asked whether you want to insure your hand against him holding blackjack. It pays two to one if he has it. The trouble is that the maths behind it does not favour you over any length of time, and most experienced players simply decline it every single time without giving it a second thought. Take that for what it is worth.

The honest position is this. Side bets carry a bigger house edge than the hand you came to play. If you enjoy them, keep them small and keep them occasional. If you are playing to stretch your bankroll as far as it will go, leave them alone entirely.

A few words on basic strategy

Blackjack is one of the very few casino games where your decisions genuinely change the outcome, and that is a good part of why people stay with it for years. A slot pays out whatever it was always going to pay out, and it makes not the slightest difference what you were thinking while the reels turned. Blackjack is not like that at all.

Basic strategy is simply the mathematically correct move for every combination of your hand against the dealer's up card, worked out long ago by people with far more patience than most of us have. Played properly, it drags the house edge down to somewhere around half of one per cent on a good table, which is about as close to even money as a casino game ever comes.

The broad shape of it goes like this. Hard seventeen or higher, you stand, always, no matter what the dealer is showing. Anything eleven or under, you cannot bust, so you take a card. Hard twelve through sixteen is the awkward middle ground, and there you generally stand when the dealer shows a weak card of two through six, because he is the one likely to bust, and you hit when he shows seven or higher because you cannot afford to sit on a losing hand and hope. Always split a pair of aces and a pair of eights. Tens you leave well alone, and fours as well. Double down on eleven nearly every time you see it.

None of that is a guarantee and it is not meant to be one. Basic strategy does not win you the hand, it just stops you giving away money on the decisions where the correct answer is already known. You will still lose hands playing perfectly. You will simply lose fewer of them, and over a long evening that difference adds up in a way you can actually feel.

Return to player, and what that percentage really tells you

You will see figures like 99.29% and 99.6% attached to blackjack tables, and they look almost too good next to the numbers on a slot game. There is a catch worth understanding.

That percentage is a theoretical return calculated across an enormous number of hands, and it assumes optimal play throughout. Play the hands badly and the real return you get is a good deal lower than the number printed on the tin. Blackjack parts company with a slot right about there. With a slot the return turns up whether you understood a single thing about the game or not, but on a blackjack table you have to go and actually earn that number, and plenty of players never quite get round to it.

The other thing to hold in your head is that short-term results have almost nothing to do with the long-term figure. You can play perfectly for two hours and lose. You can play terribly and walk away up. Neither of those tells you anything at all about the maths underneath, and treating a good run as proof that you have cracked something is how people get into bother. Expect a bumpy ride and be prepared for any sort of outcome.

Betting limits and minding your bankroll

Our tables run across a spread of stakes, from small limits that let you sit for an hour on very little, up through the higher rooms and Blackjack VIP for players who want more on the line. Each table shows its own minimum and maximum right there on the game screen before you take a seat, so have a quick look and pick one that fits what you brought with you.

The sensible way to size a bet is to work backwards from your session budget rather than forwards from what you feel like betting. Decide the total you are happy to spend for the evening, then set a stake that lets you play a decent number of hands with it. If your budget only covers eight or nine hands at the table you have chosen, you are at the wrong table, and dropping down a level will give you a far longer and far more enjoyable session for the very same money.

Chasing a loss with a bigger bet is about the oldest mistake there is and it has never once worked as a plan for anybody, though a great many people have gone and tried it anyway. The deck does not remember what it just did to you and it is not sitting there planning to make it up on the following hand.

Blackjack on your phone

You can now easily discover our entire gaming selection under a single column just with a simple click. All our games are built to run smoothly despite the device you happen to be using, so whether that is an iPhone, an Android handset or a tablet propped up on the kitchen counter, the tables load and behave the way they should.

Live blackjack works particularly well on a phone, which surprises people. The stream scales itself down, the buttons sit under your thumb where they belong, and the dealer carries on regardless. You can join a table at a bus stop and leave it three hands later without anything breaking. Our mobile casino section holds the lot of it, and nothing needs installing for you to get going. If you would sooner top the account up straight from your phone rather than digging a card out, the pay by mobile casino page runs through what is on offer there.

Getting started at TheOnlineCasino

The account creation process is quite simple and straightforward, and it takes a couple of minutes at the most.

• Open TheOnlineCasino site in your browser and find the "Register" or "Sign Up" option on the home page. Selecting this will take you through to a fresh page asking for a few personal details.
• Fill in the fields and click through. Create your login and pick a password, and do make it a strong one.
• Head to the deposit section and fund the account using whichever payment method suits you best. As a licensed operator, we will ask you to verify who you are at some stage, which is a legal requirement and not us being difficult.
• Open the blackjack section, pick a table that matches your budget, and take your seat right away.

New players joining us can claim 100% Bonus Up To £50 + 20 Free Spins on Book of Dead. Full terms and conditions apply to the offer, so give them a read before you claim, especially the parts covering wagering and game contribution, since table games such as blackjack often contribute differently to bonus play than slots do. Over on our promotions page you will find whatever else is running at the moment, and once you are playing with us regularly the rewards programme is worth a look as well.

Playing it safe

Blackjack is a game, and it should stay a game. You must be 18 or over to play with us, and that is not negotiable.

TheOnlineCasino is operated by ProgressPlay Limited of Soho Office, 3A, Punchbowl Centre, Elia Zammit Street, St. Julians, STJ3154, Malta, a limited liability company registered in Malta under C58305. We are licensed by the Malta Gaming Authority under licence number MGA/B2C/231/2012, issued on 16th April 2013, and regulated in Great Britain by the Gambling Commission under account number 39335. What that means in practice is that the games are tested, the money is held properly, and there is somebody above us keeping an eye on how we behave.

Inside your account you will find tools for setting deposit limits, taking a time out, or self-excluding altogether should you need to, and none of them takes more than a moment to switch on. Players in Great Britain can also register with GAMSTOP to exclude themselves across every licensed operator at once. If gambling has stopped being fun, free and confidential help is there through BeGambleAware.org. Only ever bet that much which you can afford to lose. Gambling can be addictive, so please play responsibly.

18+. Gambling can be addictive, play responsibly. BeGambleAware.org.