Blackjack
Authority: Hoyle's Rules of Games (Standard Casino Rules)
Standard casino blackjack uses 1 to 8 standard 52-card decks, most commonly 6 or 8 shuffled together in a shoe. Players try to beat the dealer by reaching a hand value as close to 21 as possible without going over. A natural blackjack traditionally pays 3:2, though some tables now pay only 6:5.
| Parameter / Specification | Standard Value | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| Decks Used | 1 - 8 | standard 52-card decks (6 or 8 most common) |
| Traditional Blackjack Payout | 3:2 | odds (some tables pay 6:5) |
| Dealer Soft 17 Rule | Stands or Hits | varies by casino (S17 / H17) |
History & Origin
Blackjack's documented history starts in Spain in the early 1600s: Miguel de Cervantes' story "Rinconete y Cortadillo," written around 1601-1602, describes card cheats in Seville playing veintiuno ("twenty-one"), already using the rule that an ace could count as 1 or 11 and that the goal was to reach 21 without going over. The game spread through Europe over the following two centuries -- recorded in France, and played in Britain during the 1770s-80s, where formal rules were published in 1800 under the name vingt-un.
Vingt-un reached the United States in the early 1800s; the first American rules were simply an 1825 reprint of the 1800 English rules. As the game Americanized, it picked up the name "blackjack" around 1899.
Where the Name Came From, and the Math Behind the Game
The popular explanation for "blackjack" is a since-discontinued bonus payout for a hand combining the ace of spades with a black jack. Historian Thierry Depaulis has offered a competing theory: that Klondike Gold Rush-era prospectors (1896-99) borrowed the name from zincblende, a mineral nicknamed "blackjack" that resembled the card game's top hand, and the nickname stuck to the game itself.
A more settled milestone came in September 1956, when four mathematicians published "The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack" in the Journal of the American Statistical Association -- the first rigorously calculated basic strategy for the game, and the foundation both modern basic-strategy charts and card-counting systems are built on.