Soft and hard hands

A soft hand has an ace counted as 11: A♠ 6♦ is soft 17. One more card can’t bust it, because the ace can always drop to 1. A hard hand has no ace, or an ace that must count as 1: A♠ 6♦ 9♣ is hard 16. Soft hands are played more boldly — you hit or double where a hard hand of the same total would stand.

• K♠ 7♥ — hard 17. No ace.
• A♣ 7♦ — soft 18. The ace counts as 11; our table shows the hand as “8 / 18”.
• A♣ 7♦ 5♠ — hard 13. With the ace as 11 it would be 23, so the ace counts as 1.
• A♥ A♠ — soft 12. Only one ace can be 11: two of them would make 22.
• A♥ 5♣ 5♦ — soft 21. Three cards, so not a blackjack, but the ace is still 11.
• A♦ 10♠ as your first two cards — a blackjack, paid 3 to 2.

A hand only ever goes from soft to hard, never back. Once the ace is forced down to 1, it stays 1 for the rest of the hand.

Soft starting hands — an ace with a 2 to 9 — come up in about one deal in ten (9.5%). Because they are rarer than hard totals, they are the part of the chart people learn last and forget first.

With a hard 16, every card from 6 up busts you. With a soft 16 (A,5), no card can: a ten turns it into hard 16, an ace into soft 17. Hitting a soft hand risks nothing on the next card, so the only question is whether your total is good enough to stand on.

Soft 17 and below are not. The dealer always finishes on 17 or more unless the dealer busts, so a 17 can never beat a dealer who stands — at best it ties — and anything lower wins only on a dealer bust. That is why the chart never stands on soft 17 or less: it hits, or doubles when the dealer shows a weak card.

• A,8 and A,9 (soft 19 and 20) — stand.
• A,7 (soft 18) — stand against 2, 7 and 8; double against 3–6, or stand if you can’t double; hit against 9, 10 and ace.
• A,6 (soft 17) — double against 3–6, otherwise hit.
• A,4 and A,5 — double against 4–6, otherwise hit.
• A,2 and A,3 — double against 5–6, otherwise hit.

If you hit and the hand is still soft, keep reading the soft rows, but you can no longer double: D now means hit and Ds means stand. If the hand has turned hard, switch to the hard rows of the full chart.

One hand, soft to hard

You hold A♠ 2♥ against a dealer’s 9: soft 13, so hit. The next card is 4♣ — soft 17, still a soft row, still a hit. Then 9♦ arrives: with the ace as 11 that would be 26, so the ace drops to 1 and you have hard 16. Now you read the hard rows, and hard 16 against a 9 says hit again. Three cards in a row, each decision taken from a different row of the chart.

Many players stand on A,6 because 17 “feels” finished. It isn’t. Against a dealer’s 6, standing on soft 17 earns +1.2 per 100 debens, hitting +12.9 and doubling +25.9. Against a ten, standing loses 42.0 per 100, hitting only 19.6.

Over all dealer cards, the habit of standing on soft 17 costs 0.25% of everything you bet — more than half of the whole house edge at our table.

Against a 2, standing beats doubling by three tenths of a deben per 100 — a cell that flips at tables where the dealer hits soft 17. Against an ace, hitting beats standing by half a deben. These are the margins the chart is made of; none of them is worth agonising over, but together they add up.

Soft hands matter for the dealer too. Ours stands on every 17, including soft 17 such as A♣ 6♦ — it is printed on the cloth: “Dealer stands on all 17”. At many tables elsewhere the dealer hits soft 17 instead, which gives the dealer extra chances to improve. By our calculation that rule costs players another 0.21%.