Free Blackjack: Play Money Game With a Coach

Free blackjack on this page is a six-deck game played with play-money chips, with a coach that tells you the best move for every hand and what a wrong move costs on average. The chips have no value and cannot be cashed out, so you can practice the decisions that matter without a cent on the table.

Most free blackjack pages are just a game window. This one also shows the numbers: the rules behind the house edge, a full basic strategy chart, and a running count of how often you followed the coach and what the other moves cost.

How does free blackjack work on this page?

Choose a bet, press Deal, then hit, stand, double or split. You start with 1,000 play chips. The dealer checks for blackjack when an ace or ten-value card is showing, then you act on your hands, then the dealer draws. Blackjack pays 3 to 2 and ordinary wins pay 1 to 1.

1. Pick a bet of 5, 25, 100 or 500 chips and press Deal.
2. Ask the coach with the What does the coach say button, or tick the box to see its advice before every move.
3. Play the hand. You can double on your first two cards (also after a split) and split any pair of equal value up to four hands.
4. Check the panel. It shows your chips, your net result, the average result for perfect play, and the share of moves where you followed the chart.
5. Try Play 100 hands by the chart to see how a perfect-strategy player still drifts down slowly, with big swings along the way.

What are the rules, and how do they change the house edge?

This game uses six decks, the dealer stands on all 17s, you can double after splitting, and blackjack pays 3 to 2. With perfect basic strategy the house edge is about 0.41% of your starting bet. Change the rules and the edge moves, so always check the rules before you trust any blackjack number.

Rule	Effect on the player	Used here?
Blackjack pays 3 to 2	Baseline	Yes
Blackjack pays 6 to 5	House edge rises by about 1.4 percentage points	No
Dealer stands on soft 17	Helps the player by about 0.19 points compared with hitting soft 17	Yes
Double after split allowed	Helps the player by about 0.16 points	Yes
Fewer decks (two instead of six)	Helps the player by about 0.23 points	No (six decks)
Split aces get one card each	Standard rule, no re-split	Yes
Surrender and insurance	Surrender not offered; insurance not offered (it costs about 7.4% on six decks)	Neither

The Wizard of Odds baseline of 0.57% (six decks, dealer stands on soft 17, no double after split) falls to about 0.41% when double after split is allowed, which agrees with our solver. We also played 12 million hands by the chart on a shuffled six-deck shoe in testing and measured an edge of 0.42%, within the expected margin of error.

What is the basic strategy chart for six decks?

Basic strategy is the move with the best average result for every combination of your hand and the dealer’s up card. The tables below give it for this game’s rules. Read down to your hand, across to the dealer’s card: H is hit, S is stand, D is double (hit if you cannot double), P is split.

Hard totals have no ace, or an ace counted as 1.

Your hand	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	A
5 to 8	H	H	H	H	H	H	H	H	H	H
9	H	D	D	D	D	H	H	H	H	H
10	D	D	D	D	D	D	D	D	H	H
11	D	D	D	D	D	D	D	D	D	D
12	H	H	S	S	S	H	H	H	H	H
13	S	S	S	S	S	H	H	H	H	H
14	S	S	S	S	S	H	H	H	H	H
15	S	S	S	S	S	H	H	H	H	H
16	S	S	S	S	S	H	H	H	H	H
17 or more	S	S	S	S	S	S	S	S	S	S

Soft totals have an ace counted as 11. Doubling soft hands only helps when the dealer is weak. With soft 18 and the dealer showing 3 to 6, doubling beats standing, and with a 9 or 10 you hit.

Your hand	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	A
A,2 (soft 13)	H	H	H	D	D	H	H	H	H	H
A,3 (soft 14)	H	H	D	D	D	H	H	H	H	H
A,4 (soft 15)	H	H	D	D	D	H	H	H	H	H
A,5 (soft 16)	H	D	D	D	D	H	H	H	H	H
A,6 (soft 17)	H	D	D	D	D	H	H	H	H	H
A,7 (soft 18)	S	D	D	D	D	S	S	H	H	S
A,8 and A,9 (soft 19 and 20)	S	S	S	S	S	S	S	S	S	S

Pairs are the only hands where splitting is a choice. Never split fives (double instead) or tens, always split aces and eights, and split nines except against a 7, 10 or ace.

Your pair	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	A
2,2	P	P	P	P	P	P	H	H	H	H
3,3	P	P	P	P	P	P	H	H	H	H
4,4	H	H	H	P	P	H	H	H	H	H
5,5	D	D	D	D	D	D	D	D	H	H
6,6	P	P	P	P	P	H	H	H	H	H
7,7	P	P	P	P	P	P	H	H	H	H
8,8	P	P	P	P	P	P	P	P	P	P
9,9	P	P	P	P	P	S	P	P	S	S
10,10 (any ten-value pair)	S	S	S	S	S	S	S	S	S	S
A,A	P	P	P	P	P	P	P	P	P	P

The chart comes from our own exact calculation, checked on a six-deck shoe. A few close calls differ from charts you may have seen: double soft 14 against a 4 is better than hitting by a small margin (about 0.012 of a bet), and the soft 16 and soft 18 calls above were confirmed by calculating the exact six-deck figures.

What does a wrong move cost?

Most wrong moves cost far less than people fear, and a few cost a lot. The table shows the average difference, per 1 unit of bet, between the best move and the alternative, using the same calculation as the coach. A cost of 0.10 means you lose 10 cents more per dollar bet each time you make that mistake.

Hand	Best move	Alternative	Average cost of the alternative
Hard 16 against a 10	Hit	Stand	0.0006 (close to a coin toss)
Hard 12 against a 3	Hit	Stand	0.017
8,8 against a 10	Split	Stand	0.06
Soft 18 against a 9	Hit	Stand	0.083
Hard 17 against an ace	Stand	Hit	0.131
10,10 against a 6	Stand	Split	0.128
Hard 11 against an ace	Double	Stand	0.789

Two lessons stand out. Hard 16 against a 10 looks scary and is nearly a toss-up, so do not agonize over it. Splitting tens or standing on a weak total when you should double are the mistakes that quietly add up.

How much does blackjack cost per hour?

At 0.41%, ten-unit bets at 60 hands an hour (an assumed pace) cost about 2.46 units an hour on average with perfect play. At a table that pays 6 to 5, the edge is around 1.8%, which costs about 10.80 units an hour for the same bets. That is more than four times as much.

Mistakes add to it, as the table above shows. The panel in the game adds up the estimated cost of your own deviations. Test your session cost with the blackjack house edge calculator or the gambling session cost calculator.

Why does the dealer check for blackjack?

In the American style used here, the dealer looks at the hole card when an ace or ten-value card is showing. If the dealer has blackjack, the round ends immediately and you lose only your original bet, unless you also have blackjack, which is a tie. In European no-hole-card games, you can lose extra bets to a late dealer blackjack, which makes the game a little worse for you.

Is free blackjack the same as online blackjack?

Free blackjack follows the same rules as a casino table if the rules match, but real-money online blackjack adds money, faster rounds and sometimes worse rules. The most common change is 6 to 5 payouts for blackjack, which raises the house edge by about 1.4 points. Check the payout line on the table before anything else.

Online games either use a random number generator or a live dealer. A random number generator game may reshuffle after every hand, which is the one situation where counting cards cannot work at all. Chancepedia does not link to operators or rate them. If you want to confirm a site is licensed, check its number on the regulator’s own register.

Does playing free blackjack make real gambling more likely?

Studies of teenagers link playing simulated gambling games to gambling for money. In one study of 1,220 people aged 14 to 18 who had never gambled, 28.8% gambled for money a year later, though the link between simulated and real play held only for poker among the games studied. A 2022 Australian survey found a link between simulated play and gambling problems, but could not show cause.

This page is meant for adults who want to understand the game. It has no rewards, levels or prizes, and it shows what each decision costs. If you are playing longer than you meant to, or the thought of real money is growing, take a break and open the Safer play toolkit or Get help.

What should you try next?

• Play 100 hands by the chart three times and note how different the results are even with perfect play.
• Tick the coach box for a session, then turn it off and see how many moves you get right from memory.
• Compare your result with the average shown in the panel after 500 hands. Check the cost of your deviations.
• Read how the house edge works in the expected value calculator and try risk of ruin to see how bet size changes the odds of running out.

How to read your session

The panel shows your chips, your net result, the average result for perfect play at this table's 0.41% edge, and how many moves matched the chart. The estimated cost of other moves comes from an endless-shoe calculation, so it is a guide, not an exact figure for your hand.

How it is calculated

The chart and costs come from an exact dynamic-programming solver for the rules below, with the dealer's blackjack check. House edge is the average loss as a share of the starting bet: 0.4106% with perfect basic strategy. The solver was checked against an exact finite-deck calculation and a simulation of 12 million hands on a shuffled six-deck shoe, which gave 0.42% (standard error 0.03).

Worked example

Limits

Edge figures assume perfect basic strategy and the rules listed. Different rules change the edge. Cost-of-mistake numbers assume an endless shoe. The shoe here is reshuffled when 1.5 decks remain. A short session can end far above or below the average.