Playing Blackjack on Pogo, I’ve found that a couple of their Blackjack games pay on what’s called “Five-Card Charlie” (being dealt five cards without busting).
Is this something that real casinos pay on, or is just something for fun that Pogo does?
None that I’ve ever seen. “Five cards under” is a ‘barracks’ or ‘back alley’ rule in blackjack. It often pays double in those settings.
This is a rule which is often mentioned in books about card games, but I have never seen it in action in a casino. Then again, I’ve been to casinos in Europe and Asia so far, but not America; YMMV.
I’ve noticed that even the more popular rule that three sevens count as a blackjack is becoming rare.
No casino I’ve ever been in does that, and I’ve been in quite a few.
Season 2 of GSN’s Celebrity Blackjack paid five card charlies, if that’s of any interest.
The last time I was at the Las Vegas Club in downtown Las Vegas, they paid on “6 card Charlie”, along with an assortment of other cool payoffs including 3 7’s. This was probably at least 5 years ago. I think they paid crappier on blackjack and/or limited doubling down and splitting or something to skew the odds back in the house’s favor. I still like the place. The cocktail waitresses used to be middle aged women dressed up in mini-skirted baseball outfits.
Speaking of things that casinos don’t do, what the heck is up with so-called “Vegas scoring” of Solitaire on the games that came in my Windows accessories? I couldn’t find a Vegas casino that lets people play that game.
Dunno about the specifics of the Windows games, but I have an old book somewhere that describes gambling in San Francisco around the time of the Gold Rush. Players could buy decks from the casino for $50 and would get paid $5 for every card they built out from the Aces.
I don’t know of any casinos that generally have a Charlie rule, but if they do, they probably do indeed make you pay for it with some other change in the rules used.
Now, I have played a 5-card Charlie game once at a casino. It was at one of the smaller pueblo casinos near Albuquerque (there are maybe five casinos within a 30-minute drive, so the competition is fairly fierce, especially from the ones a little further away) that would often use gimmicks to get people to play in the middle of the day. So they’d do various promotions for a half-hour or hour at table games. One time I was there and they went with a 5-card Charlie rule (with no other rule changes) for about half an hour.
So my guesses would be: Good luck finding it in Vegas, unless you’re way off-strip or maybe a real high-roller. You might be able to find it somewhere else, but probably not as a full-time rule.
I was under the impression that the 5-card Charlie rule only applied when using a single deck. That seems to make sense, because 5CC is supposed to be special due to the odds of having so many low cards being low. When using multiple decks mixed together, such a sequence must be a lot easier to attain, hence it loses its value.
Yup, that’sthe way it’s described in my copy of According to Hoyle, but the solitaire in my Windows OS is the only place I get to play it that way.
Hmm. I wonder if I can play that in Yahoo! games…
At some point in the past 10 years, every casino in Southern Louisiana and on the Mississippi Gulf Coast has had some sort of promotional blackjack game where 5 or 6 card Charlies got paid 2:1.
It’s something they advertise, and then only have available at one table at limited times, with only 5 seats at the table. Sometimes, it’s called “Spanish 21”. They have all sorts of fancy payouts…suited Blackjack pays 2:1 instead of 3:2, three 7’s pays 3:1, etc.
The drawback is that there is usually a rule that offsets any advantage the player might have by trying to meet these conditions.
One table I saw paid 2:1 on every blackjack and 3:1 on three 7’s and suited blackjacks. But they only let you double-down on 11 (no 10s or 9s or soft hands), you couldn’t double down after a split, you couldn’t resplit anything including Aces, they shuffled after about 3 decks out of an 8 deck shoe to thwart any potential card counters, etc.
The three 7’s rule really isn’t all that great since you really should only hit a 14 if the dealer’s showing a 7 or higher (it’s a bad idea in 5 out of 13 possible scenarios). It’s also highly unlikely to ever draw three 7’s in a single deck game.
At least once, I’ve personally drawn to a total of 6 cards to make a hand, only to have the dealer holding 20 or blackjack.
I’ve never seen a UK casino pay out on this. Do you have to beat the dealer as well to get the payout?
I recently flew from New Zealand to London on an Air New Zealand 747. They had a blackjack game that paid 2:1 on blackjacks. Not 2:1 against; 2:1 on. In other words, if you hit a blackjack you were only paid half your stake. This must have given the house quite an edge!
I think your probability calculation is off. As far as I can figure, the odds of five cards in a row adding to less than 21 in a fixed number of hands is unchanged by the number of decks in the shoe.
They still do that, but only on off times. I was there on a Sunday afternoon two years ago and got nice and hammered while playing $1 blackjack off of a single deck at the Las Vegas Club. They had all sorts of those odd payoffs that I wasn’t even looking for and kept winning on, but they also shuffled the deck every two hands or so to stop counting. The dealer was really nice and I played for three hours like that before I had to go lie down.
The number of decks matter. Let’s arbitrarily call 6’s and lower “low cards.” Assume you already made four low cards and just need one more. Since there are 20 low cards, and you have 4, the probability of drawing a low card at that point is (20-4)/(52-4) = .333
With a ten-deck shoe, there are 200 low cards, of which you have 4. The odds of drawing a low card are (200-4)/(5200-4) = .377
That’s just for the fifth low card. You also have to draw the 4th, the 3rd, and the 2nd ones.
Spanish 21 is a different game. The reason there are all the favorable rules in Spanish 21 is because all the 10s have been removed from the deck, which increases the house advantage. If you can memorize the basic strategy, Spanish 21 is quite a good game to play (assuming you can find the more liberal rules) though I believe the variance is higher than in blackjack.