Question of the Day - 09 December 2023

Too many players today, especially the younger crowd, think the 6-5 payout on blackjack blackjacks is standard on single-deck games and just another rule variation on many shoe games. In fact, it didn't exist anywhere before 1999.

Ever since card counting became known as a valid system for beating casino blackjack games (dating all the way back to the early 1960s), casinos have been trying to create rule variations that would negate the card-counters’ advantage over the house. At one point in the 1960s, some Vegas casinos tried allowing doubling down on hard 11 only, but this rule died quickly when players simply stopped frequenting those tables.

In 1999, Howard Grossman, a former card counter and one-time teammate of blackjack celebrity Ken Uston's, created and patented a blackjack variation called Super Fun 21. In this version of the game, most blackjacks paid even money, but Grossman added a whole raft of player options and bonuses to make the game more appealing to the public. All the bonuses combined didn’t add up to the cost of most blackjacks paying even money, so Grossman marketed Super Fun 21 as a blackjack game that card counters couldn’t beat.

A number of casinos started offering the game and found that it was popular with enough recreational players to pay Grossman his licensing fee for using the Super Fun 21 table layout and rules.

Very shortly after Super Fun 21 was introduced, two Vegas casino execs, Bill Bert and Bill Zimmer, came up with the idea of paying out blackjacks at 6-5, but not changing any of the other rules or adding any other bonuses. This simple rule change adds 1.4% to the house edge and killed two birds with one stone; it neatly negated the card counter’s ability to get any significant edge on the game and avoided having having to pay a licensing fee for a new variation of the game.

The Flamingo was the first casino on the Strip to offer 6-5 payouts on single-deck games. They started with one table, but as they found that many recreational players didn’t even notice the difference, 6-5 quickly expanded to more tables  Other casinos took note and because they didn't have to sign a contract or pay a fee to anyone to offer the game, 6-5 blackjack continued to take over the single-deck games. It has since expanded to multi-deck games and is now vastly more popular than Super Fun 21.

Ironically, Super Fun 21 gives the player slightly better odds than 6-5 blackjack. But we can thank a "reformed" card counter with inspiring a couple Vegas casino execs to look into the effect of simply adjusting the BJ payout to foil card counters.