Blackjack Strategy Card: The Full Basic Strategy Chart for 6-Deck Games

A blackjack strategy card is a one-page chart that tells you the best move for every hand you can hold against every card the dealer can show. You find your hand down the side, the dealer's upcard across the top, and the cell gives the play. The card below is the exact chart our simulation used for a 6-deck game where the dealer stands on soft 17: following it, the house edge came out at about 0.47% over 10 million hands.

It's free to use, it works online and offline, and it's the single biggest thing you control at the table.

How to read a blackjack strategy card

Each cell holds one code:

Check the charts in this order:

1. Do you have a pair? Use the pairs chart first.
2. Do you have an ace counted as 11? That's a soft hand (it can't bust with one more card). Use the soft chart.
3. Otherwise use the hard totals chart.

A soft hand turns hard when the ace has to count as 1. Ace + 6 is soft 17; if you hit and draw a 9, you have hard 16.

The full basic strategy chart: 6 decks, S17, DAS

These charts cover 6-deck blackjack where the dealer stands on soft 17, you may double on any first two cards, and you may double after splitting (DAS). They follow the Wizard of Odds basic strategy for 4 to 8 decks. "A" is a dealer ace.

Hard totals

Soft totals

Pairs

Patterns worth memorising, straight from the chart:

• Hard 17 and up: always stand. Hard 8 and below: always hit.
• Hard 12 to 16: stand against 2 to 6 (except 12 against a 2 or 3, which you hit), hit against 7 to ace.
• Hard 11: double against everything except an ace. Hard 10: double against 2 to 9.
• Always split aces and 8s. Never split 10s or 5s (play 5,5 as a hard 10).
• Soft 19 and 20: stand. Soft 18: double against 3 to 6 (stand if you can't), stand against 2, 7 and 8, hit against 9, 10 and ace.

H17 blackjack cheat sheet: what changes when the dealer hits soft 17

Many tables make the dealer hit soft 17 (H17). That costs you: in our simulation the house edge for a DAS game rose from 0.47% to 0.65%. It also changes these cells on a 6-deck chart:

Everything else on the card stays the same. The common thread: when the dealer has to keep drawing on soft 17, they bust a little more often, so doubling becomes slightly more attractive in a few borderline spots.

If you can't double after splitting (no DAS)

Without DAS, some low pairs are no longer worth splitting, because one of the reasons to split them is the chance to double a good second card.

Our charts don't include surrender. If your table offers it, the Wizard of Odds strategy page in our sources shows where to use it.

What the strategy card is worth: our simulation

A strategy card doesn't make blackjack a winning game. It makes it as cheap as the rules allow. Here is the house edge our simulated player achieved by following the matching chart for each rule set:

These are Monte Carlo estimates, each with a standard error of about 0.036 percentage points. The rule-change costs the Wizard of Odds publishes, such as 0.22 points for H17, agree with the gaps in our table within about two standard errors; our 6:5 vs 3:2 comparison lays them side by side.

We didn't simulate a player who ignores the card, so we don't put a number on that. What the table does show is that rules move the edge as much as many strategy errors would: the gap between the best and worst 3:2 games is 0.31 points.

Blackjack tips the card can't give you

• Pick the table before the play. A 6:5 payout adds about 1.36 points, more than any decision on the card can claw back.
• Prefer S17 and DAS. Both show up in our table as cheaper games.
• Use the chart for your rules. An S17 card at an H17 table gets three cells wrong.
• Don't take a hunch over the chart. Hard 16 against a 10 is a hit, even though it busts often. The chart already weighs that.
• Splits deserve their own read. Our guide to splitting pairs in blackjack explains each pair row.

Online blackjack strategy and advanced blackjack strategy

Online blackjack strategy is the same basic strategy, just easier to apply: you can keep the card open in another window or use our blackjack strategy calculator to check any hand for your exact rules. Digital blackjack that reshuffles every hand plays like a fresh shoe each time, which is what a basic strategy card assumes.

Advanced blackjack strategy usually means card counting, where players track the cards already dealt and adjust bets and some plays. It only works in games dealt from a shoe that isn't reshuffled after every hand. Our card counting guide explains the Hi-Lo method honestly, including why it does nothing in continuously shuffled games.

Playing blackjack with USDT

A low edge means other costs matter more. At 0.47%, 1,000 USDT of total bets costs about 4.70 USDT on average, so a network fee on a small deposit can rival the whole session's expected loss. Holding your bankroll in USDT rather than BTC or ETH keeps price swings out of the picture. For a game with a fixed, published edge you can verify per round, compare with our Mines demo guide.

Common mistakes

• Treating ace + 6 as a "17" to stand on. It's soft 17: hit or double, never stand.
• Reading D as "always double". With three or more cards, D means hit and Ds means stand.
• Splitting 10s because two 10s "might become two 20s". A hard 20 is already the second-best hand.
• Using a 6-deck S17 card at an H17 table without the three changes.
• Expecting the card to win. It shrinks the edge to the figures above; it doesn't flip it.

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