Your two hands
What the game costs
Strategy chart
- Maths reviewed by Josh Miller
- Tested by Diana Westfield
Blackjack Switch strategy has two parts: whether to swap the second cards between your two hands, and how to play the hands you end up with. The free CasinoCalcs calculator does both. Enter all four cards and the dealer’s up card, and it compares the two ways round and tells you how to play each hand.
Blackjack Switch strategy: when to switch
You play two hands with equal bets and may swap their second cards. Say you hold 10,6 and 5,10 against a dealer 6. Kept as dealt, that’s two hard 16s, worth about −42% of one bet between them. Switched, it’s 10,10 and 5,6: a 20 and an 11 to double, worth about +107%. Same four cards, a swing of nearly 1.5 bets.
Most switches are that obvious. The close ones are where the calculator earns its keep, for example A,6 and 10,10 against a 9: keeping 20 and soft 17 is worth more than making 21 and 16, because a switched ace-ten counts as 21, not a blackjack.
Why the playing strategy is different
Blackjack pays even money, and a dealer total of exactly 22 pushes every hand still in play. Both make standing on stiff hands less attractive and doubling less profitable:
- 11 against a 10 is a hit, not a double.
- 8,8 against a 10 or an ace is a hit, not a split.
- 13 against a 2 and 12 against a 4 are hits.
- 10 against a 9 is a hit.
Everything else is close to normal basic strategy, which the chart shows in full.
House edge
With best switching and play, our model puts the house edge at about 0.71% per hand. That uses an infinite deck, dealer hitting soft 17, doubling on any two cards, doubling after a split and resplits. Published six-deck figures are about 0.58%, so a real shoe is a touch better than this. Remember you’re playing two hands: at £10 each and 60 rounds an hour, the average cost is about £8.50 an hour.
Another push-22 game with a very different trade-off is Free Bet Blackjack. For the standard game, see the blackjack strategy chart or test hands in the blackjack calculator.
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