Multihand Blackjack

Where a game lets you choose the number of boxes, play a few rounds with one and then with several to feel the difference. The spread table further down says what to expect as boxes are added.

Each box is a separate bet, played by the same rules against the same dealer, so each carries the house edge of a lone hand at that table. On the standard six-deck game with the dealer standing on soft 17, that edge is 0.41% of each box's stake with basic strategy. Change a rule and that figure moves; the blackjack odds page lists by how much.

Over many rounds the averages simply add up. Three boxes of one unit each lose, on average, three times what one box loses, exactly what a single box with three units would lose. The expected cost of a round follows the money on the table, not the number of boxes.

The rule: Extra boxes put more money into each round, and that is all they change about the price: the edge on every unit bet stays where the table's rules set it.

The first change is the total stake per round. Five boxes at one unit put five units in play before a card is dealt, and doubles and splits can add more on any of them.

The second is how far a round can swing. The usual measure is the spread, the standard deviation of a round's net result in units of one box's bet, and a single box at the standard rules has a spread of 1.15. Boxes facing one dealer card do not move independently: when the dealer busts, every box still standing wins, and when the dealer makes a strong total, most of them lose. Statistically, two boxes in the same round have a correlation of 0.37, on a scale where zero means unrelated and one means identical.

In short: A round of three boxes swings more than three boxes played in separate rounds, yet less than a single bet three times as large, because the boxes rise and fall partly together with the dealer's hand.

In practice a bankroll moves faster per round, in both directions, because more is staked at once. Set the number of boxes by what you are prepared to lose in a session, and play only with money you can afford to lose.

Figures assume the reference six-deck game with the basic strategy chart on every box, and each is a multiple of the stake on one box. The middle column is what the same number of hands would show if each were dealt against its own dealer hand; the last is one box carrying the whole stake.

A selection of the multihand tables here and what each name says the game adds. Every game's full rule set is on its own rules screen.

Play each box as if it were the only one on the table. The basic strategy chart reads the right play from the box's own cards and the dealer's upcard, and neither depends on the other boxes: 16 against a dealer 10 is played the same way whether the next box shows 20 or has busted.

The boxes are played in a fixed order, each finished, doubles and splits included, before the next starts. A split adds a hand with its own stake, played by the chart like any other.

The costly mistakes are decisions made for the round instead of the box: standing on a weak total to protect a round that looks ahead, or doubling one box to win back another. Each raises the price of that box and does nothing for the rest.