Power Blackjack

Introduction

Power Blackjack is a Blackjack variant that offers players the chance to replace Double cards  if they don’t like the card they receive and split up undesirable 15 and 16 hands. Power Blackjack uses 6 standard 52 decks of cards.

Power Blackjack is only offered online at casinos using WagerWorks software (run by IGT). IGT appear to be running down the WagerWorks table games and several notable games no longer seem to be available. At the time of writing this article Power Blackjack is still available at some online casinos.

Play Structure

Differences to standard Blackjack and rules that are standard to the online game;

·         Power Double – When Doubling hard or soft 9, 10 or 11, if the Double card you receive isn’t good you can choose to replace this card with a new one.

·         Power Split – When you receive a 2 card hard 15 or 16, even when the cards are not of matching rank,

·         Dealer 22 is considered a push for all player hands.

·         6 decks.

·         Stand Soft 17.

·         Double After Split.

·         No Re-Splits.

·         Dealer does not peek for Blackjack.

Other than the above the game functions as a standard Blackjack game in terms of the play of hands and how wins are decided.

Optimal Strategy

Power Blackjack, like Blackjack, has a Basic Strategy to minimise the House Edge which can be seen below;

Legend

House Edge*

The House Edge for Power Blackjack is 0.20%

Fairness Calculator

Below you can find a calculator to allow you to check the fairness of your wins/losses when playing Power Blackjack.

*This fairness calculator will assume that you’ve been playing with the optimal strategy detailed above. If you have not then the calculator will NOT return accurate results.

Winning Strategies

Offline

While we are aware that Power Blackjack has been offered offline, it’s far from wide spread making opportunities to beat this game very uncommon and probably not worth the effort of learning the necessary skills. However it seems highly likely that many of the strategies used against standard Blackjack games, including Card Counting, Hole Carding, Shuffle Tracking, Steering and Sequencing, could be employed against Power Blackjack if the right circumstances presented themselves individual had the skills necessary to derive optimum strategy.

Online

There are several methods of legitimately gaining an advantage playing online Power Blackjack games. By and large these involve the use of promotions, bonuses and comp point systems as the games by themselves – assuming the game is functioning in a correct fashion and there are no errors in the paytable – will not provide any additional information about the cards and shuffles after every hand.

It should be noted that online advantage play is not specific to Power Blackjack and in recent years the wagering requirements for player’s choosing to play any table game has inflated to the point that Power Blackjack is now often a sub-optimal choice for the player. For more information on beating online casinos see BeatingBonuses.com.

* All ‘House Edge’ figures in this article are based on the ‘loss per unit wagered’ rather than ‘loss per initial bet’.