Pontoon: Two Different Games Wearing One Name
Updated
Ask for Pontoon in Melbourne and you get a 48-card Spanish deck with no hole card. Ask for it in a British living room and you get a game with buying, twisting and five-card tricks. They share a name and almost nothing else. The first thing to establish at a Pontoon table is which Pontoon.
- Australian Pontoon is Spanish 21 with the dealer taking no hole card.
- It uses 48-card decks — every ten removed — which alone costs 2.18%.
- Published house edge: about 0.4%, roughly 0.3% to 0.5% depending on the venue.
- British Pontoon is a different game: buy, twist, stick, five-card trick.
- In both, the dealer wins ties. Check that before anything else.
Australian Pontoon
This is the one you will meet in a casino. It is Spanish 21 under another name, with the same 48-card decks, the same bonuses for long 21s and the same headline promise that a player 21 always wins.
The deck is where the money is. Removing the four tens from every deck — the jacks, queens and kings stay — turns 16 ten-value cards into 12. We computed what that costs on its own: 2.18%. Ten-value cards make your blackjacks, land your doubles and break the dealer, and taking a quarter of them away is enormous. Everything generous in the rules exists to buy that back.
Two things separate it from Spanish 21 proper:
No hole card. The dealer takes a single card and draws the rest after you have finished. If the dealer then turns a natural, bets you have doubled or split are exposed to it in a way they never are at a table where the dealer peeks.
No 6-7-8 or 7-7-7 bonuses. The suited-hand bonuses that Spanish 21 pays are usually absent, and the long-21 bonuses do the work instead: five cards 3:2, six cards 2:1, seven or more 3:1.
We do not publish our own house edge for this game. Our engine prices the Spanish 21 rules well, but the no-hole-card rule interacts with “a player 21 always wins” in a way we could not pin down from the sources we trust — we get an answer roughly three quarters of a point too favourable to the player, which means we have a rule wrong somewhere. Published figures put it near 0.4%. We would rather tell you that than print a number we cannot stand behind.
British Pontoon
The other Pontoon is much older and is mostly played away from casinos. The vocabulary alone tells you it is a separate game:
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Twist | take another card, face up, no extra stake |
| Buy | take another card face down and increase your stake |
| Stick | stop — but only once you have reached 15 |
| Pontoon | an ace with a ten-value card, paying 2:1 |
| Five-card trick | five cards without busting, paying 2:1 |
Two features matter more than the rest. You may not stick below 15, so the stiff hands you would normally sit on must be played out. And a five-card trick beats everything except a pontoon, regardless of total — a five-card 16 beats the dealer's 20.
That last rule is not a curiosity. We computed the value of an ordinary five-card Charlie in six-deck blackjack at 1.54% to the player, which is larger than the entire house edge of a good table. In British Pontoon the five-card trick is stronger still, because it wins outright rather than merely pushing the dealer aside. The full working is on our five-card Charlie page.
Against that, the dealer wins all ties and the payouts are made on a stake you may have increased several times by buying. We have not computed a house edge for British Pontoon and we are not going to guess at one: the home rules vary far too much from table to table for a single figure to mean anything.
What to establish before you sit down
Whichever Pontoon you have found, four questions settle most of the arithmetic:
How many cards in a deck? Forty-eight means the tens are gone and you are playing the Australian game. Fifty-two means you are not.
Does the dealer take a hole card? If not, ask what happens to a doubled or split bet when the dealer turns a natural. The answer is worth real money and dealers will tell you.
What does a five-card hand pay? This is the single most valuable rule in the British game and it is sometimes quietly dropped.
Who wins a tie? In both Pontoons the answer is the dealer. At an ordinary blackjack table it is nobody, and the difference between those two is far larger than most players expect — we measured it at nearly eight points in Double Exposure.
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By Martin Kosek · every number on this site is computed by us, not copied.
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