Bust It: The Dealer-Bust Family of Side Bets

Updated 24 August 2026

Bust It pays when the dealer breaks, with the payout depending on how they did it — the number of cards, or the card that broke them. It belongs to the same family as Buster Blackjack, and the family has a shared characteristic: the outcome you will actually hit pays the least.

How the dealer actually busts

These are exact frequencies for a six-deck game with the dealer hitting soft 17, computed by carrying the card count through the dealer’s draw tree. They match published values to six decimal places.

The distribution is the whole story. About 60% of all dealer busts are three-card busts — and every paytable in this family pays the least for those. The payouts that would change your evening are attached to outcomes you might see a few times a year.

Bust It, Buster, and why the name means nothing

“Bust It”, “Buster Blackjack” and “Dealer Bust” are different products built on the same event, and their paytables are not interchangeable. Some pay by the number of cards, others by the card that broke the dealer, and the amounts differ between casinos offering the same name.

We computed a full paytable for one version and got 6.18%, matching the published figure exactly. That number applies to that paytable and no other. As with Lucky Ladies, a page quoting “the” house edge without naming the table is telling you nothing.

Is it countable?

In principle. The dealer busts more often when the shoe is rich in tens, so a positive count improves the bet — and unlike the main game, the improvement is large in relative terms.

In practice the same objections apply as to every other countable side bet: it needs a second count, the window arrives late in a shoe most tables never reach, and side-bet limits are too low to pay for the attention.

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By Martin Kosek · every number on this site is computed by us, not copied.