How many cards are dealt per hand?

The books tell us that the average hand in Blackjack (including the dealer hands) contains about 2.7 cards. I thought I would look at this a bit further. We always temper this estimate by saying that the number of players can affect the average. So, I first looked at the effect of number of players. This chart shows the number of cards used by the dealer for 1 to 5 players in orange (six decks, H17, nDAS, Basic Strategy). With one player, the dealer averages 2.78 cards per round. This increases to 2.91 cards per round with two players. This is because the dealer does not need to finish his hand if the players all bust or receive a Blackjack, and the more players there are the less likely this will occur. As additional players are added, the cards used by the dealer continue to increase — but nearly the entire increase is seen going from one player to two players. The cards used by the player is about 2.71 per round. The players use fewer cards, even though the player can split, because the dealer hits all stiffs. And unfortunately there are a lot of stiffs. The green bars display the overall cards per person (dealer and player) per round. This changes less by number of players than one might think. This is because the cards per round increases from one to two players because of the increase in dealer cards, but then decreases as additional players are added and the lower number of cards used by players brings down the overall average.

www.qfit.com/book/z820Chart.gif

 © 2009 Norman Wattenberger