Show HN: Blackjack Break, a minimal quick-play blackjack game | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Blackjack Break, a minimal quick-play blackjack game

blackjackbreak.com

132 pointsltiger64 comments

Nice game. I'm glad you identified the major problem in many online blackjack toys - that they've got a scummy vibe to them - and done a clean break from that.

Some ideas:

* Keyboard shortcuts would be welcome - the click targets are grouped together on desktop and are not very large.

* Upscaling the game on desktop would be helpful for usability, it's quite small currently.

* I know it's just a hobby project, but it seems the action buttons are not in the tab order - was this deliberately removed? This seems like it would be a really easy step to take for at least minimal accessibility. Currently, a mouse is required on desktop due to this problem.

Excellent suggestions, thanks! Any key recommendations for the shortcuts?

hjkl; or anything that can be done one-handed, preferably on the home row

From the about page: Towards the end of 2017, I found myself wanting to play a quick game of something while I was working. That something turned out to be blackjack. I tried a few web-based games and downloaded a bunch to my phone. All of them either felt kinda scammy, were hard to look at, or just played way too slow. I like making things, so I made Blackjack Break. I hope it's a fun diversion for you like it is for me.

Very nicely done, enjoyed playing it! My only wish would be to hit after split, though the way you handled it is perfectly valid.

Thanks, never played in a casino - Are the left and right hand cards hit immediately after splitting?

It depends. The rules vary from casino to casino. :)

The Wizard of Odds has a very thorough walk-through of the variations of rules - and what they mean to the odds:

https://wizardofodds.com/games/blackjack/basics/#toc-RuleVar...

Brings back memories from playing many, many hours of playing optimal strategy blackjack to release generous bonuses from online casinos. :)

Well done on launching btw. I second the UI suggestions about making UI a bit easier.

I was impressed by the online casinos using real dealers and those scannable oversized cards. I don’t think I would have gone that route but great that people are employed and I guess that puts to bed any discussion about algorithms or if the computer is dealing under to itself. Wizard Of Odds is an amazing guy, I love the articles on his site.

My wish has been granted, I can play the hands after split now, very nice

It would be nice if it told you after finishing a hand if you deviated from basic strategy. Also would be nice if some of the more common rule variants where settable (DAS, S/H17, etc.).

This would be a great candidate for automatic light/dark mode with the prefers-color-scheme css option.

Thanks, I'll experiment with this.

Makes me recall “BytesJack” from the old 10kb build competition: http://heliom.github.io/bytesjack/

this is slick

Keyboard controls, responsive design, no images (I don’t think), pseudo elements, and all weighing in under 10kb.

Is there something like this, but for poker? The issues described by the author with most of the already existing offers are the exact same ones i have. I just want a poker game that isn’t slow, doesnt feel scammy with tons of dark patterns and microtransactions, and has a clean and simple UX.

Great job btw, i definitely dig the overall feel of the app.

http://gpokr.com not as active as it used to be but every now and then you'll find a table.

Gpokr was very popular back in the day as a GWT project, nice to see it alive 13 years later.

Great job!

For people not very into BJ - there are rules available with pretty binary decisions trees (depending on rules). Quick google search brought https://www.blackjackapprenticeship.com/blackjack-strategy-c... but there are plenty of other resources. Essentially, I believe there is always a perfect strategy available that should guarantee profit (given unlimited cash available to play unlimited game)

Without counting (which is not possible with this version since there is no shoe or deck to count from), optimal (basic) strategy will guarantee a loss in the long run. If there was a basic strategy which guaranteed profit for the player, no casino would offer this game.

The perfect strategy is called "being the house"

With the set of rules implemented here, including early surrender and double after split, it seems perfect basic strategy, even without counting, gives a very minimal edge to the player.

Also, this version lets you count cards, since it uses a single deck and displays shuffles.

I was looking for this! Works great on the Tesla touch screen while charging.

So cool, I love it!

Is this open source? I kinda want to try training a Blackjack AI, and the clean minimal design for here could help if I try giving the game state to the AI as an image.

Also it would be fun to play with data of everyone's games if you're collecting them.

> clean minimal design

The design is so minimal I thought it wasn't loading correctly for me.

Seems I may have taken the minimal aesthetic too far :)

If your AI is any good it will refuse to play because it’s realized the house always wins.

I spent a few hours watching card counting videos on YouTube to see if there was anything to it - didn’t matter who it was, they spent the entire time belly-aching because other players were getting “their” cards. Amazing how all these card counting schemes depend on everyone else playing perfect basic strategy.

Card counting schemes have almost nothing to do with the cards of others. I have no idea who you were watching but they sound like frauds. It's trivially easy to verify that counting systems work in theory. If you have a sufficiently good counting system, you will know exactly the cards remaining in the deck (Suppose I knew only 8s were left in the deck. I just never hit and let the dealer bust continually). Even the best human-capable counting systems only have an edge of 1-2%, meaning that you still need to get lucky or have a ton of time and a near infinite bankroll (minimize risk of ruin).

Having more players at the table hurts the efficiency of the count because more cards come out between when you place your bet, and when you receive both of your cards. This means that the correlation between the count when you place your bet, and the hand you receive, decreases.

House edge at good casinos is normally below 1%, and you're telling me an AI with perfect information couldn't beat a dealer whose moves are incapable of changing given new information?

Source: I've card counted for 6-7 years now

If your playing with a six deck shoe and the casino is cutting at deck and a half, how much of an edge can you really get? Even if your the only player.

Depends on your betting spread and table rules. But at a deck in a half you're probably looking at around 0.75% for a pretty standard ruleset [1]

The casino I usually play at cuts at under a deck and also has a side bet (Over Under 13) with even better odds than the blackjack game if you use a different count. It can also be gamed many other ways (they give $5 and $2.5 chips, but don't pay quarters, so if you bet $7.50 for your hand, they pay $11.50, essentially improving your odds even further).

[1] https://www.qfit.com/book/ModernBlackjackPage309.htm

Those people are dumb... other people at the table hitting too often actually helps a card counter, because you see more cards per hand.

A good question might be why they are not all rich if card counting is such an easy win. I’m pretty sure the best way to get rich on Wall Street is to teach people how to get rich on Wall Street. Maybe the same thing holds true for blackjack. If anyone was winning big on a consistent basis I’m sure the casinos would change things up to stop that ie table limits, six deck shoes, continuous shuffle machines.

Card counting is an "easy win" only in that it's relatively easy to master. With a bit of practice, you can gain a consistent (but small) edge. The problem is, the variance is enormous. You need a large bankroll to sustain the wins, and you need to put in a lot of hours to get into the long run. That's a major reason most successful counters play in teams.

Of course you're right in that once a casino notices you winning, you're a target for closer observation. A six-deck shoe isn't much of an obstacle, though. In Atlantic City, they'll flat-bet you (adjust the table limits so you can't vary your bet). In Las Vegas, they'll just outright ban you from playing.

It has been done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Blackjack_Team

But if you are that skilled, funded, and organized, there are probably better ways to make money.

Very nice. Any plans on open-sourcing this? I'm a newbie at blackjack and have been wanting to build a similarly minimalistic version adding a "strategy feedback" mode to help me memorize basic strategies.

I've got a simple blackjack program[1] in bash that I occasionally play; it's ugly code, but it's pretty straightforward.

More directly, I wrote (perl) a blackjack tester[2] to quiz myself, as well as a simple output of basic strategy[3]. I haven't touched these in half a decade, but seem to work fine!

1: https://github.com/Amorymeltzer/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/bla...

2: https://github.com/Amorymeltzer/sandbox/blob/master/blackjac...

3: https://github.com/Amorymeltzer/sandbox/blob/master/basic_st... but I recommend running it as perl basic_strategy.pl | awk '{printf "%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\n", $1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6, $7, $8, $9, $10, $11;}'` for nicer output

  perl basic_strategy.pl | column -t

Indeed, but the broader spacing from awk is easier on the eyes

Very nice! It might slightly more comfortable to play if the dealer and player were differentiated better. Is the source code available?

This is really nice! It reminds me of a similar site I played on ages back that supported online play for several different card games - it had a similar minimal, clean design. (Wish I could find it again.)

I agree, often I look for a card games online, but they are mostly bloated, full of ads, require accounts, really spammy.

Refreshing to see this.

Minimal is good. I went the other way.

A bit relevent to this subject matter is a redesign of blackjack I finished awhile ago. I wanted to make game characters out of the cards and put the player in a dungeon-like environment rather than the generic game table.

Still working on v2, mainly updates to the graphics.

I put it on itch.io and you can download it for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

popup21.itch.io/popup21

Nice! Is the deck ‘infinite’ or are you shuffling a set amount of decks together and dealing from the limited set?

The deck has 52 cards and is shuffled once 75% of the cards have been delt

Great minimalistic interface. Two suggestions:

* Dark mode

* Add short instructions on how to play Blackjack. Im familiar with twenty-one but not with Blackjack so it'd be nice to have it there. I had to read Wiki page to play it

Of course when I play fake blackjack I make 10x my initial bankroll within 5 minutes.

Would be awesome if you could turn on basic strategy suggestions for each hand to help teach it. How many decks is this based off, or is it random from a single deck each deal?

Nice game. I really enjoy how simple it is. Is there a reason it's not a PWA? I would love to be able to install it with offline play

Very nice! The only thing I would recommend is after splitting, showing both hands even though the action is only on one of them.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but on iOS I have to double tap the links sometimes to get them to fire.

I'll increase the clickable area of the links. That may fix this.

Hah, interesting to see this here. I'm actually working on this but for mobile devices.

Nice game. Would be nice to know when the deck gets shuffled for card counting purposes :)

I think it does that. I received a "(shuffled)" indicator after a deal several hands in.

https://blackjackbreak.com/about#feedback

>Dealer shuffles after dealing 75% of the deck

This is sleek! Hopefully hold'em is next up in the queue :)?

TIL I suck at blackjack

Just in time for re:Invent! Thanks. :-)

Very well done, hands play quicky

Very cool. Addictive.

Thanks!

Loved it. Perfect.

'Preciate it!

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