Hard 16 Against a Dealer 9
Updated
Surrender, but only just. This is the narrowest surrender decision on the chart: giving up beats hitting by 0.5% of a bet. If your table has no surrender, hit without hesitating.
- Surrender if offered — but the margin is only 0.5%.
- Otherwise hit: 50.5% lost, against 54.3% for standing.
- Standing is the real mistake here, and it costs 3.8%.
- A dealer 9 is stronger than it looks: it busts only 22.9% of the time.
A nine is not a weak card
Players surrender freely against a ten and an ace and then talk themselves out of it against a nine, because a nine looks beatable. It is not. The dealer busts with a nine showing 22.9% of the time — barely more often than with a ten, and far less often than with any card from 2 to 6.
Worse, a nine most often finishes on 19, which beats every hand you can reach by standing on 16 and most of the hands you reach by hitting it.
What each option is actually worth
Six decks, dealer stands on soft 17, averaged across every two-card 16. Bet of 1 unit:
Why such a thin margin still matters
0.5% of a bet sounds like nothing, and on one hand it is. The reason to take it anyway is that surrender costs you nothing to learn: it is a fixed −0.5, it never needs recalculating, and it removes a hand you would otherwise misplay under pressure.
If you are counting, this is also one of the first cells to move. At a high true count the extra tens make standing better than both, because the dealer’s bust rate climbs and your draw gets more dangerous at the same time.
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By Martin Kosek · every number on this site is computed by us, not copied.
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