Free Bet Blackjack: The Free Doubles Are Not Free
Updated
The casino puts up the money when you double a hard 9, 10 or 11, and again when you split a pair. You keep the winnings and never risk the extra chip. In exchange, the dealer no longer busts on 22 — it pushes. We computed all three rules separately, and the trade is not close.
- Free doubles on hard 9, 10 and 11 are worth 4.19% to you.
- Free splits on any pair except tens are worth 1.94%.
- Dealer pushing on 22 costs you 6.95%.
- We compute the whole game at 1.02%, against a published 1.04%.
- Every one of those numbers is ours.
What each rule is worth
Start from an ordinary six-deck game where the dealer hits soft 17. We compute that at 0.62%. Then we switched each Free Bet rule on by itself.
| Rule | Effect | Good or bad for you |
|---|---|---|
| Dealer busting with 22 is a push | +6.95% | bad, and by a mile |
| Free double on hard 9, 10, 11 | −4.19% | good |
| Free split on any pair but tens | −1.94% | good |
Those three do not simply add up, and the reason is worth knowing: a pair of fives is a hand you would rather free-double than free-split, and a pair of aces is the reverse. The gifts overlap, so you cannot price the game by adding rule effects from a table — they have to be measured together. That is why our full-game figure is computed in one pass rather than assembled from the rows above.
Why they picked 22
Twenty-two is not an arbitrary choice. It is the single most common total a busted dealer holds, because it is what every stiff hand — 12 through 16 — turns into when the next card is a ten, and ten-value cards are nearly a third of the deck.
So the rule is precision-engineered. It does not soften the dealer's bust rate across the board; it removes the most frequent slice of it and leaves the rest. Our figures for how often the dealer breaks on each total are in how often the dealer breaks.
There is one thing the rule does not touch: a player blackjack still wins, even against a dealer 22. That is the only reason the game is playable at all.
The rule most write-ups leave out
Free Bet lets you re-split up to four hands, including aces — and every one of those extra hands is on the casino. In ordinary blackjack, going from one split to four hands is worth about five hundredths of a percent. Here it is worth eight times that, because you are being handed free bets rather than putting up your own money.
We know the size of it because we got it wrong first. Our model originally split a pair once and stopped there. Here is what each step was worth:
Split once: 1.43%. Re-split to four hands: 1.09%. Re-split aces as well: 1.02%. The published figure is 1.04%. Two rules that are worth five hundredths of a percent in ordinary blackjack are worth four tenths here, because the extra hands are not your money.
With re-splitting included we compute 1.0165% against the published 1.04%. The remaining twenty-four thousandths run the same way in every variant we model fully: published figures come from simulations dealt from a shoe with a cut card and played from a strategy chart, while our engine works out the exact composition and plays the best move available. The cut card alone is worth 0.020% on Wizard of Odds’ own measurement.
Is it a good game?
No. At around 1% it is roughly twice the house edge of a plain six-deck table with a 3:2 payout, and the free doubles do the psychological work of making that invisible: you remember the hand where the house paid for your double on eleven, and you do not remember the four times a dealer 22 quietly took your twenty away.
For a counter it is worse than the headline suggests. The push-22 rule caps what a rich shoe can do for you — a deck full of tens breaks the dealer more often, and this game has taken the most valuable part of that away. If you want a variant that rewards a good shoe, this is not it. Compare with what each ordinary rule costs before you sit down.
The live-dealer version is a different game
Everything above is the casino-floor game: six decks, dealer hits soft 17, and re-splitting to four hands including aces. Evolution runs a Free Bet table in its live studio, and it does not have those rules. Live tables allow one split only, as they do at every studio.
That is not a detail. By the decomposition above, going from one split to four free hands was worth about four tenths of a percent — the largest single item on this page after the push-22 rule. Take it away and the game gets meaningfully worse, and it was not a good game to start with.
Keep reading
By Martin Kosek · every number on this site is computed by us, not copied.
← Back to guides