Power Blackjack: Who Pays for the Triple Doubles

Updated

Power Blackjack gives you something no other blackjack table does: the option to triple or quadruple your bet instead of merely doubling it. It pays for that by removing every nine and every ten from the shoe. We computed what that removal costs on its own, before any of the gifts: 2.09%.

The short version

What the missing cards cost

Power Blackjack deals eight decks with every nine and every ten pulled out. The picture cards stay, so a shoe of 416 cards becomes 352, and the ratio of tens to everything else drops sharply.

We ran the standard eight-deck game against that shoe with ordinary rules — ordinary doubling, doubling after a split, dealer stands on soft 17 — to isolate the card removal from the features. It comes out at 2.575% against 0.485% for a full shoe. The removal alone is worth 2.09%.

Evolution publishes an RTP of 98.80% for the game as actually played, a house edge of 1.20%. So the triple and quadruple doubles, plus doubling after a split, hand back roughly 1.4% of the 2.09% that was taken away. The gifts are real and they are worth less than what was removed. That is the same structure as Free Bet Blackjack and Spanish 21, which also removes tens.

Standard eight-deck game 0.485% Same rules, no 9s or 10s 2.575% Power BJ as published 1.20% (98.80% published RTP)
The middle bar is the shoe change with nothing given back. The gifts return most of it, and not all.

Why there is no strategy chart on this page

Basic strategy is a function of the shoe. Take out a sixth of the cards, weighted entirely toward high ones, and the answers change: dealers bust less often, so standing on a stiff hand is worse; and your own chance of drawing a ten to a doubled hand falls, so doubling is worse too.

We could compute a chart for this shoe. We have not published one, for a reason worth stating: a chart computed for the shoe would still be wrong for the game, because it would not account for the triple and quadruple options. When you can put out four units instead of two, the hands worth doubling change again, and our solver does not model a variable double.

The major independent rules database takes the same position and deliberately omits a chart for this game, on the grounds that showing the standard one would mislead. We agree. A chart that is right about the cards and wrong about the bets is not half correct; it is confidently wrong on exactly the decisions it exists to answer.

If you play this game, the standard chart is not merely suboptimal on it — it is the wrong chart. This is not a table to bring habits to.

The rest of the rules

Dealer stands on soft 17. Blackjack pays 3:2. Double, triple or quadruple on any two cards and after a split. Split once, split aces receive one card. No 6 Card Charlie. The dealer checks for blackjack against a ten as well as an ace, which is unusual for Evolution and is worth 0.103% relative to their standard table.

Four side bets are offered, and all four are more expensive than the game: Perfect Pairs at 5.70%, 21+3 at 3.91%, Hot 3 at 3.79% and Bust It at 5.29%. Those are the operator’s published figures rather than ours; we have not recomputed them for the modified shoe, and they would change on it.

Counting Power Blackjack

A count is a statement about how the shoe differs from a full one. Here the shoe has been altered before the first card is dealt, so a standard counting system is calibrated against a deck composition that does not exist at this table.

The count still tracks the remaining tens correctly — it just starts from a different baseline, and the true count conversions and betting thresholds you have learned no longer correspond to the advantages they used to. Nothing about this is impossible to redo. It is simply not the same game you learned.

Penetration: about 50%, and that is the whole counting story. Two independent sources put live shoes at roughly half dealt before the shuffle, and neither found a studio that deals deeper. What still is not published is the penetration of any particular table, which moves shift to shift. Since penetration decides almost everything, half a shoe is what makes live counting a losing hobby rather than a job.

Is it fair?

Live blackjack is the most checkable game in an online casino, and that is worth saying plainly. The cards are physical, the shoe is on camera, and you can watch the deal. Nothing about the shuffle or the burn is hidden behind a random number generator the way it is in RNG blackjack.

What a stream cannot show you is the part that matters: where the cut card goes, whether the shoe is the same one after a break, and how the shuffle was done off camera. None of that requires dishonesty to hurt you. A perfectly honest table with a cut card at half the shoe is still a table where counting does not pay.

So the fairness question and the profitability question are separate, and only the second has a clear answer. A license tells you the game is not rigged. It does not tell you the game is beatable.

Keep reading

Spanish 21the same trade, on a floor Free Betfree doubles, and the bill Evolutionthe standard table

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

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