Every blackjack table has a line printed across the felt, usually in the same lettering as the insurance line: Blackjack pays 3 to 2. On some tables it reads 6 to 5 instead. The difference looks like a rounding detail. It is the largest single rule change in the game, worth more than the dealer's soft-17 rule, doubling after splits and surrender combined.
How often a natural turns up
A natural, or blackjack, is an ace and a ten-value card as your first two cards. A six-deck shoe holds 312 cards: 24 aces and 96 tens, jacks, queens and kings. The chance of being dealt one of each is
2 × (24/312) × (96/311) = 4.75%
which is one natural in every 21.06 hands. The number of decks barely shifts it: a single deck gives 4.83%, two decks 4.78%, eight decks 4.75%. Whatever the shoe, you can count on a natural about once every 21 hands.
Not every natural collects the bonus. If the dealer also has blackjack, the hand is a push and nobody is paid. With your ace and ten already out of the shoe, the dealer completes a natural 4.56% of the time, which leaves an uncontested natural on 4.53% of hands. That is the figure every payout calculation below rests on.
The table in Blackjack 21 Big Cards Offline pays blackjack at 3:2 on a six-deck shoe.
What the bonus is worth
At 3:2, a 10-chip natural pays 15. At even money it would pay 10. The extra half-bet, arriving on 4.53% of hands, is worth 0.5 × 4.53% = 2.27% of every initial bet you make.
That number explains why the bonus exists. Blackjack's built-in disadvantage is that the player acts first: if you bust, your bet is gone before the dealer turns over the hole card, so when both hands would have bust, the house still wins. Everything else in the rules (doubling, splitting, surrender, the dealer's fixed drawing rules) only trims that edge. The 3:2 natural is the one payout above even money on the main bet, and it is the main thing that hands the advantage back. A standard six-deck game with good rules sits at roughly half a percent to the house. Pay naturals at even money and the same game would be close to three percent.
| Natural pays | 10-chip natural wins | Added to house edge |
|---|---|---|
| 3:2 | 15 | 0.00 points |
| 7:5 | 14 | 0.45 points |
| 6:5 | 12 | 1.36 points |
| 1:1 | 10 | 2.27 points |
The 6:5 row is worth working through in chips. Play 1,000 hands at 10 chips each and you stake 10,000 chips. About 45 of those hands are uncontested naturals. At 3:2 each one pays 15; at 6:5 each pays 12. Three chips short, 45 times, is 136 chips, or 1.36% of the total staked. Nothing about how you play can recover it, because the natural is dealt to you complete and there is no decision attached to it.
A 6:5 table is not a slightly worse 3:2 table. It is a game whose house edge is more than three times as large, with the same cards, the same decisions and the same chart of correct plays.
How the other rules compare
The rule differences people argue about at a table are real, but they are an order of magnitude smaller. These are the commonly quoted figures for a six-deck shoe, each measured against the more favourable version of the rule:
- Natural paid 6:5 instead of 3:2: about 1.36 points.
- Dealer hits soft 17 instead of standing: about 0.2 points.
- No doubling after a split: about 0.14 points.
- No late surrender: about 0.08 points.
Add the last three together and you get a little over 0.4 points, under a third of the cost of a 6:5 payout. A table that hits soft 17, forbids doubling after splits and offers no surrender, but pays 3:2, is still a much better game than one with every friendly rule and a 6:5 natural.
Insurance is the payout that goes the other way
When the dealer shows an ace, you are offered insurance: a side bet of up to half your stake that pays 2:1 if the hole card is a ten-value card. Setting aside your own two cards, 96 of the 311 cards left behind the dealer's ace are tens, so the bet wins 30.87% of the time. A 2:1 payout needs a win rate of one in three, 33.3%, just to break even, so insurance in a six-deck shoe returns about 7.4% less than it takes. Your own cards nudge that: holding two non-tens it is 6.8%, holding a ten it is worse. Either way it is more than ten times the edge on a good main game.
Even money is the same bet under another name. When you hold a natural and the dealer shows an ace, taking even money locks in a 1:1 payout in place of a 3:2 that might be pushed. It is exactly equivalent to insuring your blackjack, and because your own ten is already out of the shoe, it is the worst version of the bet: 95 tens in 309 unseen cards, a cost of 7.8%. If you are playing to get the most out of the 3:2 rule, the time not to give it away is the moment it is in your hand.
The How to play guide in Blackjack 21 Big Cards Offline lists the card values, every move, the dealer rules and the payouts, so the checklist below is a quick one to run through there.
Reading a table before you sit down
The order of checks follows from the numbers. Look for the natural's payout first, because it is worth more than everything else combined. Then the dealer's soft-17 rule, which is usually printed beside it. Doubling and surrender rules come last. One more detail: in most casinos an ace and a ten made after splitting aces counts as 21, not as blackjack, and is paid at even money, so a split hand never earns the bonus.
Blackjack 21 Big Cards Offline seats you with four other players and the dealer, and the best hand sweeps every chip the losers left behind; the figures in this post cover the standard blackjack payouts only, not the sweep pot. It plays offline, the chips are free every day, and they have no cash value.