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Blackjack is often seen as the most welcoming casino game for beginners – there are no combos to think of like in poker and no complex tie bets like in baccarat. But on your first visit to a brick-and-mortar casino, you’ll quickly notice the dealer operates a thick stack of cards from several decks, and the same is true for online games. What’s up with that and how many decks are used in blackjack, after all? Let’s find out!
In a Friday night game with friends, no one thinks about the number of decks when playing blackjack – it’s always a single deck of cards, right? Well, the same was true for casinos – up until the 60s, which we’ll discuss later on. For now, let’s establish the fact: a typical dealer in most casinos uses six to eight decks of the standard 52 cards to play a single game of blackjack.
So why exactly does anyone need several decks of cards for blackjack? The answer is simple: the most advanced card-counting players have mastered the single-deck game of blackjack to the point when they gained a serious advantage over the dealers. The casinos freaked out, and someone came up with the only possible solution that preserved most of the game's mechanics and gave them back the traditional house edge: more decks.
The game changed drastically: instead of counting which cards are out in a deck of 52, the number increased to 208 (four decks), 312 (six), and even 416 (eight)! While this doesn't render card counting completely useless, using this strategy became significantly less effective and is now mostly used as a party trick to annoy your single-deck opponents. So long, the good old days of Edward Thorp's book Beat the Dealer!
The question is, did the reform make the game any worse?
The number of cards used in blackjack at Lucky Tiger Casino is limited to 416 (8 decks). You can try our classic and exotic renditions with different number of decks, including Luxe Multipliers, Atlantic City, and 21 Burn Blackjack, and enjoy the game by mixing up your winning strategies and fun in equal proportions!