Free Bet Blackjack: Why the Dealer's 22 Pushes and What It Costs You

Free Bet Blackjack gives the player free doubles on hard 9, 10 and 11 and free splits on most pairs, and pays for them with one rule: when the dealer finishes on exactly 22, every player hand still in play pushes instead of winning. Wizard of Odds puts the house edge of the standard version at 1.04 percent, against 0.57 percent for a conventional six-deck game with similar base rules. The free bets are real, but the 22 push takes back more than they give.

How does a "free" double or split actually work?

The game was designed by Geoff Hall, and the Wizard of Odds page on Free Bet Blackjack describes the rules it understands to be the current norm: six decks, dealer hits soft 17, blackjack pays 3 to 2, double after split allowed, doubling on two cards only, resplitting pairs (including aces) up to four hands, and no surrender. On top of that base sit three special rules.

Free doubles. On a two-card hard total of 9, 10 or 11, the dealer matches the original wager with a "free bet" button and the player receives one card. If the hand loses, the player loses only the original wager. If it pushes, the original wager comes back. If it wins, the player is paid as if the full double had been in action, so a $10 bet that is free-doubled and wins returns the $10 plus $20 in winnings. Ordinary doubles with the player's own money remain available on other two-card hands.

Free splits. Any pair except tens can be split for free. The original wager goes on the first hand and a free-bet button on the second. If the second hand wins, the button is replaced with real chips equal to the original wager; if it loses or pushes, the button is simply taken back. Free doubles and free splits remain available on the hands that result from a split.

Dealer 22 pushes. If the dealer busts with exactly 22, any player hand of 21 or less pushes.

The arithmetic of the free bets is one-sided in the player's favor. On a free double the player risks one unit to win two; on a free split the second hand risks nothing to win one. The cost sits entirely in the 22 rule.

Rule cards differ between jurisdictions, so the card at the table governs. The "Free Bet Blackjack with Push 22 Progressive" rules of play on file with the Nevada Gaming Control Board, for example, describe a six- or eight-deck game in which the free bet applies to a hard 9, 10 or 11 "with any number of cards," and to pairs excluding both fours and ten-valued cards. That version allows doubling on any number of cards and lets aces be resplit with one card each. It also states that "a dealer total of 22 will push all remaining hands except a player blackjack which will still get paid."

How often does the dealer finish on exactly 22?

For a six-deck game in which the dealer hits soft 17, Wizard of Odds gives the probability that the dealer draws to exactly 22 as 0.073536. That is about one hand in every 13.6 (1 ÷ 0.073536), or roughly 7.4 hands per 100.

Most of the time the dealer's 22 would have been a bust that paid every standing hand. Under Free Bet rules those wins become pushes. The size of that change on its own shows up in the Wizard of Odds blackjack rule variations table, which lists "dealer bust on 22 is a push" at −6.91 percent of player return when added to an ordinary game with no compensating free bets. That is the scale of what the free doubles and free splits have to buy back, and they buy back most of it but not all.

Player blackjacks are the exception. Under the rules on file in Nevada, a player blackjack is still paid when the dealer makes 22, so the push only hits hands that were played out.

What is the house edge, and how does it compare with a standard six-deck game?

Wizard of Odds puts the house edge of Free Bet Blackjack under the standard rules above at 1.04 percent. For comparison, the Wizard of Odds blackjack house edge calculator gives 0.57 percent for a conventional six-deck game with the same base rules: dealer hits soft 17, double on any two cards, double after split, split to four hands, resplit aces, no surrender, blackjack 3 to 2. (The calculator's figure is for a cut-card game under basic strategy, and it allows doubling on any two cards, which Free Bet's standard rules also do.)

The gap is 0.47 percentage points. In money terms, a player who puts $10,000 in action over a trip expects to lose about $104 at Free Bet Blackjack ($10,000 × 0.0104) and about $57 at the conventional game ($10,000 × 0.0057). The free bets make the game feel generous hand by hand, while the 22 push collects the difference quietly, about seven times per hundred hands.

Rule changes shift the Free Bet edge further. The Wizard of Odds page lists these effects on player return:

Two of these deserve attention on a rule card. A version that excludes fours from free splits, as the Nevada rules of play above do, costs the player 0.27 points. A 6-to-5 blackjack payout costs 1.36 points, which would push the game's edge to about 2.4 percent (1.04 + 1.36).

One quirk is the deck count. In ordinary blackjack more decks are worse for the player; in Free Bet, the Wizard of Odds page reports that one deck costs 0.14 points and two decks 0.06 points relative to six. The page's explanation is that more decks mean more free splitting, because removing cards from a larger shoe changes the odds of drawing another pair less.

How should strategy change at a Free Bet table?

The single instruction Wizard of Odds puts first is to accept every free double and free split opportunity. Its pair chart shows a free split on every pair from 2s through 9s and on aces against every dealer upcard, with 5s free-doubled as a hard 10 and 10s stood. That includes splits no conventional chart recommends, such as 4-4 against a dealer 10 or 9-9 against an ace, because splitting costs nothing.

The less obvious changes come from the real-money hand. Compared with the Wizard of Odds four-to-eight-deck basic strategy chart for a dealer who hits soft 17, the Free Bet real-money chart:

• hits hard 12 against a dealer 4, and hard 13 against a dealer 2, where the conventional chart stands;
• free-doubles hard 9 against every dealer upcard, where the conventional chart doubles only against 3 through 6, and free-doubles hard 10 against a 10 or an ace, where the conventional chart hits;
• never doubles soft 13 through 15, doubles soft 16 only against a 6, soft 17 only against a 5 or 6, and soft 18 only against a 5 or 6, standing on soft 18 against 2 through 4 and on soft 19 against a 6, where the conventional chart doubles all of those.

Doubling with real money is less attractive here because a dealer 22 turns a doubled win into a push, and the player has paid for a double that returns nothing extra.

The page also gives a separate chart for a hand that is riding on a free-bet button, because a push on a free hand is worth exactly as much as a loss. That chart is more aggressive: it hits hard 17 against a dealer 7, 8, 9 and ace, hits soft 18 against a 2 or 3, and doubles soft 19 against a 5 or 6 and soft 20 against a 6. In practice this applies to the second hand of a free split, where standing on a stiff total and pushing on a dealer 22 gains nothing.

What does the Push 22 side bet pay for?

Many Free Bet tables carry a side bet that wins when the dealer makes exactly 22, which is the outcome that hurts the main bet. For a version paying 11 to 1, Wizard of Odds gives the expected value as −0.117565 per unit in a six-deck H17 game, a house edge of about 11.76 percent.

The arithmetic follows from the 22 probability above. The bet wins 11 units 7.3536 percent of the time and loses 1 unit the other 92.6464 percent:

0.073536 × 11 − 0.926464 × 1 = 0.808896 − 0.926464 = −0.117568

The tiny difference from the published figure is rounding in the probability. Per $100 wagered on the side bet, the expected loss is about $11.76, more than eleven times the expected loss per $100 on the main hand.

Pay tables vary. The Nevada rules of play for the Push 22 Progressive describe a $1 bet that pays "5 for 1" on any dealer 22, higher amounts when the dealer's 22 cards are all one suit or one color, and a progressive for a suited 4-5-6-7. Because its pay table differs, the 11.76 percent figure does not apply to that version, and the rules of play on file do not publish a house edge for it. The general point holds for any version: the side bet pays out on the exact event that turns the player's main-game wins into pushes. It moves money between the two bets rather than undoing the 22 rule.