Play real hands with play money. Every decision is graded against the basic strategy chart, and your mistakes are turned into the one number that matters: what your play costs.
A new session clears the scoreboard. The seed decides the cards: the same seed deals the same hands in the same order on any device, so you can replay a session or send the link to someone and compare scores. Your stats are kept in this browser only.
Play money. Every decision is graded against the basic strategy chart.
Free practice tool. Play money only: no deposits, no prizes, no real-money links. If gambling is causing you harm, the National Problem Gambling Helpline is 1-800-522-4700.
The scoreboard shows three figures side by side because they mean different things.
Each mistake is priced in expected value: the difference, on average over every way the cards could fall, between the play you made and the chart play. Standing on 16 against a 10 costs under 20 cents on a $25 bet. Doubling it costs about $13. The trainer treats both as mistakes and tells you which ones are expensive.
Find your hand down the side and the dealer's face-up card across the top. Hard totals are hands without an ace counted as 11. Soft totals have one (A,7 is soft 18). Pairs have their own rows, because splitting is only possible there.
The chart changes with the rules. Flip either switch on the table and it redraws: when the dealer hits soft 17 you double 11 against an ace, and with surrender on you give up 16 against a 9, 10 or ace and 15 against a 10. Match the switches to the table you intend to play before you practise.
It is the hand people get wrong most, because both choices feel bad and both are. Stand, and you win only when the dealer busts, which a 10 does less than a quarter of the time. Hit, and you bust more often than not, but the hands where you draw a small card pull the average up. Hitting loses about 53.5 cents per dollar and standing about 54: the closest call on the chart, and the chart takes the half-cent. If surrender is offered, take it: losing exactly 50 cents beats both.
Insurance is a separate bet that the dealer's hidden card is a ten. It pays 2 to 1, so it needs to win more than one time in three to break even, and fewer than one card in three is a ten. It loses about 7% of whatever you put on it. "Even money" on a blackjack is the same bet under another name. The trainer offers insurance every time the dealer shows an ace, and taking it is always graded as a mistake.
If the real table pays 6:5 on blackjack, none of this helps: that one rule costs more than every mistake a careful beginner makes. Walk past it.
Nothing on this page is copied from a chart. The odds engine works out the expected value of every play for every hand against every dealer card, and the chart is simply the best play in each cell. All four charts (two switches, two positions each) are then checked cell by cell against the published 4 to 8 deck charts at Wizard of Odds, and that check runs again before every change goes live.
The perfect-play figures come from the same engine, and agree with the published house edge for these rules to within a few hundredths of a percent.
The cost of a single mistake is worked out for the exact cards on the table. Once in a while those cards tip a close call the other way (a 16 made of three small cards against a 10, for example). When that happens the trainer accepts either play and says so.
The blackjack liquidation page makes the case that correct play costs about what money orders cost, without the bank deposits. That only holds if the play is actually correct. Put your buy-in and the amount you expect to wager into the cash-out panel beside the table and it shows the cost at perfect play, at your measured accuracy, and at the roughly 2% that playing by feel gives away.