Blackjack Basic Strategy Trainer

Why practise it instead of reading it

The chart has a few hundred cells and most players know the ones that come up every few hands within an evening. The trouble is the other ones. Soft 18 against a 9, a pair of 9s against a 9, 12 against a 3 — they turn up once or twice an hour, and once or twice an hour is exactly the rate at which you can play a hand wrong for years without noticing. A table does not tell you when you have made a mistake. It pays you or it does not, and a wrong play wins often enough to feel fine.

The trainer does tell you. Every hand is graded against the play the solver finds for your rules, with a line or two on why, and every mistake is kept for you. Once you have a few, pick My mistakes from the practice menu to drill only those. A hand drops off the list the next time you play it correctly.

What the grade actually measures

Nothing here is looked up. When you pick a play, the solver works out what every available option is worth on that hand — stand, hit, double, split and, if the table offers it, surrender — and compares yours with the best of them. The difference is under Expected value details, as a share of your bet. Splitting 5s against a 6, when the play is to double, costs about half a bet every time it happens. Hitting a pair of aces against a 10 instead of splitting them costs about a quarter of one. Standing on 16 against a 10 instead of hitting costs less than one hundredth of a bet, and the trainer says so, because a close call is a different kind of mistake from a costly one.

Because it solves rather than looks up, the trainer stays right when you change the rules. Set the dealer to hit soft 17 and A,8 against a 6 becomes a double. Take away doubling after a split and 4,4 against a 5 goes back to a hit. Whatever table you are practising for, set its rules first and the grading follows.

How to use it

Start on all hands. They are dealt from a real shoe, so you meet each situation about as often as you would at a table, which is the rhythm you want to be comfortable with. Once you are getting nearly everything right, move to the tough ones: twenty-five situations players most often get wrong, each a hand where the correct play feels unnatural. Hard totals, soft totals and pairs each have their own set if one group is giving you trouble, and the table rules fold out under the trainer if the game you are practising for is different.

Keyboard works throughout. H, S, D, P and R make the play and Enter deals the next hand, which is faster than clicking and closer to the pace you will have to decide at in a real game.

The model, and where it stops

Every hand is solved by playing out every card that could follow, against every way the dealer’s hand could finish from the upcard showing, with the dealer’s peek for blackjack taken into account. Two things are deliberately left out. The shoe is not depleted by the cards already on the table, and pairs are not split a second time. At four decks or more the effect is a few hundredths of a percent. At one or two decks a handful of borderline cells may come out differently from a published chart, and those are the cells the trainer marks as close calls.

Your score and your list of mistakes live only on this page and reset when you leave it. Nothing is stored and nothing is sent anywhere.