Spanish 21: A Deck With No Tens
Updated
Spanish 21 is played with a 48-card deck: every ten is removed, while the jacks, queens and kings stay. We computed what that alone costs the player — 2.18% — and the entire design of the game is a set of generous rules that hand most of it back.
- The deck has no tens. Face cards remain, so 16 ten-value cards become 12.
- Removing them costs the player 2.18%. We computed that.
- Bonus rules give back most of it: player 21 always wins, bonuses for long 21s, late surrender after doubling.
- We compute the full game at 0.56% (S17) and 0.96% (H17), bonuses included.
What the missing tens cost
We took our standard six-deck calculation and simply removed the tens, leaving the jacks, queens and kings, then recomputed the whole game. Everything else identical: H17, double after split, late surrender, 3:2.
The same trade turns up in the live studios. Power Blackjack removes every nine and every ten and hands back triple and quadruple doubles instead of the Spanish 21 bonuses. We priced the card removal there separately: it is worth 2.09%.
The result is 2.71% against 0.53% for a normal deck — the missing tens cost 2.18%. Ten-value cards make your blackjacks, make your doubles land and break the dealer. Taking a quarter of them out is enormous.
We have since computed the whole game, bonuses included: 0.56% when the dealer stands on soft 17 and 0.96% when it hits. The commonly published figures are 0.40% and 0.76%, so we come out slightly dearer in both cases. That gap is the usual one: published numbers come from simulations played off a strategy chart, while our engine works out the exact composition and plays the best move available.
What the rules give back
Spanish 21 is unusually generous, and it has to be:
A player 21 always wins — it is not a push against a dealer 21. A player blackjack always wins too. Those two alone are worth a great deal.
Bonuses for long 21s: a five-card 21 pays 3:2, six-card 2:1, seven-or-more 3:1, with larger bonuses for 6-7-8 and 7-7-7 in the same suit.
Late surrender after doubling (“double down rescue”), re-doubling, and splitting up to four hands including aces.
Is it a good game?
On the numbers, yes — the published 0.40% beats a typical six-deck blackjack table at 0.46%… but only if you play the correct strategy, and Spanish 21 strategy is not blackjack strategy. The missing tens change many decisions, and the bonuses change more. Playing it with a blackjack chart gives back the advantage and then some.
That is the honest catch. A game with a lower house edge that almost nobody plays correctly is not, in practice, a lower house edge. We would rather say that than publish a chart we have not computed.
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By Martin Kosek · every number on this site is computed by us, not copied.
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