Tie in Blackjack

The High Tie blackjack side bet (HT) dates back at least to 2004, where it is mentioned in this article. I recently ran into this bet at a casino I was visiting. After all these years, it’s still around. In fact, it is also part of the DigiDeal lineup. This wager pays when the player is dealt blackjacks and pairs, with bonuses for suited hands. At first, it may appear that this collection of unrelated elements would make the bet uncountable. But the fact that blackjacks are part of the pay table outweighs the other parts of the bet. Any card counting system that compares ten-valued cards and aces against pip cards can be used to beat this side bet.

In considering this bet, we define a “High Tie” to be any hand when both the player and dealer both have blackjack. This outcome gives the top payout. All other payouts are based on the player’s hand alone. In this document from the State of Washington, a number of pay tables and versions are given. Rather than going through each possible pay table and version, I am going to present only the single-deck and double-deck pay tables in live-play at the casino mentioned above. Here is the combinatorial analysis:

Note that the house edge for the two-deck version is 6.475%. This contradicts the house edge of 6.823% given in the Washington documentation. I puzzled over this until I realized that I could get the 6.823% number if I simply reversed the payouts for the suited blackjack and suited pair. When I re-did the combinatorial analysis with suited blackjack paying 4 and a suited pair paying 6, my results matched the documentation with a house edge of 6.823%. The question is then, which is right? Which of these two pay tables is on the floor of the casino? For the purpose of this study, I am going to use the pay table above, with a house edge of 6.475%, and assume the house edge given in the Washington documentation is wrong.

It is clear that HT is vulnerable to the standard High-Low card counting system (2, 3, 4, 5, 6 = +1, T, J, Q, K, A = -1), which I denote (-1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, -1). My first step was to quantify this vulnerability to get a baseline. The following table gives the results of using the High-Low count against HT. These results were obtained by a simulation of one hundred million (100, 000, 000) two-deck shoes, with the cut-card placed at 75 cards (29 from the end):

If the maximum bet is $100, and the AP is playing heads-up on a fast game, getting 200 rounds per hour, then the AP using the High-Low count will earn about $121 per hour from the HT.

• Win in Blackjack
• Hit Blackjack
• Bucheimer Blackjack
• How to Blackjack?
• 21A Blackjack