Reference
Blackjack glossary
Updated 10 August 2026
Blackjack has its own vocabulary, most of it inherited from the pit and none of it explained to you before you sit down. Here is all of it, in a line each.
On this page
01 Cards and hands
| Blackjack | An ace plus any ten-value card on the first two cards. Also called a natural. Pays 3 : 2 and can only be tied, never beaten. |
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| Natural | The same thing, and the term dealers actually use — it distinguishes a two-card 21 from a 21 assembled out of three or more cards, which pays only even money. |
| Hard hand | A hand with no ace, or with an ace already forced down to a value of 1. Hard hands can bust on the next card. |
| Soft hand | A hand where an ace is still counted as 11. It cannot bust on one card — the ace simply drops to 1 to absorb the damage. |
| Soft 17 | Ace-6, or any 17 with a live ace in it. Whether the dealer stands on it (S17) or hits it (H17) is the biggest rule difference between two otherwise identical tables. |
| Stiff hand | A hard total of 12 to 16 — high enough to bust, too low to win on its own. The hands basic strategy spends most of its time on. |
| Pat hand | A hand of 17 to 21 that you would not normally draw to. |
| Bust | Going over 21. The hand is dead immediately and the bet is collected before the dealer plays. |
| Up-card | The dealer's face-up card. Every decision you make is a response to it. |
| Hole card | The dealer's face-down card, revealed only after all players have acted. |
| Ten-value card | A ten, jack, queen or king. Sixteen of every fifty-two cards, which is why strategy assumes the next card is probably a ten. |
| Five-card Charlie | A house rule, rare and not standard, where five cards under 22 wins automatically. |
02 Moves and decisions
| Hit | Take another card. Signalled by tapping the felt. |
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| Stand | Take no more cards. Signalled by waving a flat hand over your cards. |
| Double down | Double your bet for exactly one more card, then you must stand. Only available on your first two cards. |
| Split | Turn a pair into two hands, each with its own bet. Most tables allow up to four hands. |
| DAS | Double After Split — whether you may double a hand created by splitting. Its absence costs you about 0.14%. |
| Resplit | Splitting a hand that was itself created by a split, when a second pair appears. |
| Insurance | A side bet, up to half your stake, that the dealer's hole card is a ten. Pays 2 : 1 and loses money on average every single time. |
| Even money | Insurance offered to a player holding a blackjack, phrased as a guaranteed 1 : 1 instead of a risky 3 : 2. The same bad bet in nicer clothes. |
| Surrender | Fold before drawing and take half your bet back. Late surrender is offered after the dealer checks for blackjack; early surrender, offered before, is far better for the player and almost extinct. |
| Peek | The dealer checking the hole card for blackjack when showing an ace or a ten, ending the hand immediately if they have it. |
| Deviation | Departing from basic strategy because the count says so. Only meaningful to a card counter; otherwise just a mistake. |
03 The table and the shoe
| Shoe | The box the dealer deals from, holding several shuffled decks at once — six is standard. The whole point is that cards are not reshuffled between hands. |
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| Pitch game | A hand-dealt game using one or two decks, with your cards face down. Better odds, more scrutiny. |
| Cut card | The coloured plastic card slotted into the shoe. When it surfaces, the hand is finished and everything is reshuffled. |
| Penetration | How deep into the shoe the cut card sits. Matters enormously to a card counter and not at all to anyone else. |
| CSM | Continuous Shuffling Machine — a device that returns cards to the shoe after every hand, making counting pointless. |
| Burn card | The first card off a fresh shoe, discarded face down before dealing starts. |
| Discard tray | Where played cards go until the reshuffle. Its fullness is how you eyeball penetration. |
| First base | The seat on the dealer's left, which acts first. |
| Third base | The seat on the dealer's right, which acts last, and which strangers will blame for their own losses. |
| Heads-up | Playing alone against the dealer, with no other players at the table. |
| Pit | The area behind the tables where the casino's supervisors stand. A pit boss runs it. |
| Shoe game | Any multi-deck game dealt from a shoe with the cards face up — the format most people mean by "blackjack". |
04 Money and payouts
| 3 : 2 | The standard blackjack payout — a 100 bet returns 150 profit. The number to check before you sit down. |
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| 6 : 5 | A degraded blackjack payout that adds roughly 1.4% to the house edge, near-tripling it. Printed on the felt in the same friendly type as everything else. |
| Push | A tie. Nobody wins, your bet comes back. |
| Even money | A 1 : 1 payout. Also the name of the insurance bet offered on your own blackjack. |
| Table minimum / maximum | The smallest and largest bet the table accepts, posted on a placard. |
| Colour up | Exchanging a pile of small chips for fewer large ones, usually as you leave. |
| Buy-in | The cash you convert to chips when you sit down. |
| Bankroll | The money you have set aside to play with — and, in any sane version of the activity, the ceiling on what you can lose. |
| Unit | One table-minimum bet, used as the yardstick for talking about results without naming amounts. |
| Side bet | An optional extra wager — perfect pairs, 21+3, and so on. Almost all carry a house edge many times that of the main game. |
| Comp | Something the casino gives you free based on how much you play. Never free. |
05 Strategy and maths
| Basic strategy | The mathematically correct move for every hand against every dealer up-card, for a given set of rules. Not a system or an opinion — a solved table. The chart is here. |
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| House edge | The casino's long-run advantage as a percentage of every bet. Six-deck blackjack with perfect basic strategy: about 0.5%. |
| Expected value (EV) | What a decision is worth on average across every possible outcome. Basic strategy is simply the highest-EV move in every cell. |
| Variance | How wildly results swing around their average. High variance is why a correct player can lose all night and an incorrect one can win. |
| RTP | Return To Player — the house edge stated from the other direction. A 0.5% edge is a 99.5% RTP. |
| Card counting | Tracking the ratio of high to low cards left in the shoe to know when the remaining deck favours the player. Legal, difficult, and unwelcome. |
| Running count / true count | The raw count of high versus low cards seen, and that figure divided by the decks remaining. The second is the one that means anything. |
| Hi-Lo | The most common counting system: low cards +1, tens and aces −1, sevens through nines zero. |
| Martingale | Doubling your bet after every loss. Feels like a system, is a way to lose your entire bankroll faster. |
| Provably fair | A shuffle whose seed is committed cryptographically before the deal and can be verified afterwards, so the house cannot alter the shoe after the fact. What Just Blackjack does. |
| Simulated gambling | A casino game played with chips that have no cash value and cannot be cashed out. The full explainer. |
| Social casino | The industry's name for simulated gambling with leaderboards, streaks and gifting attached. |
06 Table slang
| Monkey | A ten-value card. Players ask the shoe for one out loud, which does not work. |
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| Paint | A face card — jack, queen or king. |
| Toke | A tip for the dealer, often placed as a bet on their behalf. |
| Shoe's hot / cold | Superstition. The cards have no memory of the last eight hands, and neither should you. |
| Wonging | Watching a table and only sitting down when the count is favourable. Named after Stanford Wong. |
| Barbering | Handling your bet after the cards are out. Do not. |
| Whale | A player betting large enough that the casino reorganises itself around them. |
| Griffin | A player recorded in an industry database of suspected advantage players. |
| Steaming | Playing angrily and badly after a loss. The most expensive habit at the table, and the only one entirely within your control. |
Learn the language at a table that costs nothing
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