Blackjack basic strategy chart: every hand, every upcard, one page.

Solved for the rules you set

The chart, for your table.

Rules 6 decks · dealer stands on soft 17 · double on any two · double after split · no surrender Change

DecksSingle deck2 decks4 decks6 decks8 decks Dealer on soft 17StandsHits Doubling allowed onAny two9 to 1110 and 11 Double after splitAllowedNot allowed SurrenderNot offeredLate surrender Highlight what changed from the standard chart Standard game

Blackjack basic strategy chart — 6 decks, dealer stands on soft 17, double on any two cards, double after split, no surrender.

Your hand down the side · the dealer’s card across the top

 

How to read the chart

1. A pair? Pairs grid first. P means split and play each new hand from the top; any other letter means play the pair as its total.
2. An ace counting as eleven? Soft grid. Hit it and it may turn hard — then you are back on the hard grid.
3. Anything else? Add the cards and find the row on the hard grid. Two cards or five, the row is the total.

Ds is double if the table allows it and stand if it does not — which is also the play once you have already taken a card. Rh is surrender where it is offered and hit where it is not. If soft and hard totals are new, soft vs hard hands is the guide before this one.

Every cell is solved in your browser by the engine behind the strategy calculator. The six-deck grid matches the published chart cell for cell; at one or two decks a few borderline cells can differ from a printed card, which averages over more hand compositions than a total-dependent grid does.

Three sittings

The whole chart in eighteen lines.

Nobody memorises 340 cells. You memorise these — the hard lines one sitting, the soft lines the next, the pairs the third. All 18 hold in every cell of the standard chart; pick one to light up the cells it covers, and change the rules above to see whether it still holds.

The order matters. About seven hands in ten arrive as a hard total, one in seven as a pair and one in ten as a soft hand, so the seven hard lines are the ones you will lean on most. The soft lines are where people go wrong, because the same total is not the same hand. The pair lines are the shortest and the most expensive to get wrong — aces and eights above all.

Same chart, different table

What the rules move.

Every printed chart is right for one game. These are the cells that change when a rule changes, each found by solving the whole chart again with that one rule flipped. The shape never changes; a few cells do.

Moving a cell and costing you money are different things

The rule that moves the most cells is not the one that costs the most. Blackjack paying 6 to 5 instead of 3 to 2 moves nothing at all — every cell is the same — and costs more than every other rule on the board put together.

The dealer hitting soft 17 moves three cells and costs about a fifth of a percent. Late surrender moves four and gives back a little under a tenth. The house edge calculator prices each rule for the table in front of you; this page only says what to do differently once you are sitting at it.

At the table and away from it

Using it at the table.

The chart is allowed. What it is not is fast.

A printed card is permitted at almost every blackjack table — the casino sells them in the gift shop, because a player who follows one still loses half a percent. Paper or laminate only, never a phone, and at table pace: consult it on every hand and the pit will ask you to put it away. Some rooms let you hold it but not lay it on the felt. Online, nobody is watching.

The reason to learn it anyway is that a play you have to look up is a play you will sometimes skip looking up.

Where this goes next

This page is the chart; the basic strategy guide is the reasoning behind it. The three decisions it spends most of its cells on each get a guide of their own: doubling down, pair splitting and surrender.