Blackjack
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49 free Blackjack trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Blackjack is the most widely played casino banking game in the world, and one of the few a sharp player can actually beat. Its family tree runs from a Cervantes story about card cheats in Seville, through the English game of vingt-un, to Klondike prospectors who borrowed the name of a zinc mineral for the top bonus hand. These 49 questions cover the rules as played in casinos: how aces count, the 3:2 natural, hit, stand, double, split and surrender and their hand signals, soft 17, insurance, first and third base, hole-card and no-hole-card games. There are questions on house edge and rule variations, from the Reno rule to 6:5 payouts; on advantage play, from Hi-Lo counting and shuffle tracking to the Atlantic City ruling that casinos cannot bar counters; on variants like Spanish 21, Blackjack Switch and pontoon; and on the people and stories, from Thorp and Ken Uston to the MIT Blackjack Team, Rain Man and the film 21. Every answer is cited to the page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What values can an ace take in blackjack?
1 or 11
1 or 11. An ace counts as 11 unless that would bust the hand, so a player holding an ace and a five can take another card with no risk of going over 21.
Q 02In blackjack, a king counts the same as which other card?
The ten
The ten. Jacks and queens count ten too, so 16 of the 52 cards in a deck are worth the same, which is why card counters track how many of them are still to come.
Q 03In blackjack, what is a two-card 21 also called?
A natural
A natural. It beats every hand but another natural, even a three-card 21, and a player who splits aces and then draws a ten usually has only an ordinary 21.
Q 04What does a standard casino table pay on a player's blackjack?
3 to 2
3 to 2, so a $10 bet wins $15. The bonus matters more than it looks: paying less for a blackjack is the most damaging common rule change a player can meet.
Q 05What is the blackjack dealer's face-down card called?
The hole card
The hole card. In American casinos the dealer peeks at it for a blackjack before anyone plays on, while most European casinos do not deal it until every player has finished.
Q 06Blackjack's English forerunner was played under which French name?
Vingt-un
Vingt-un, French for twenty-one. Its rules first reached print in a London edition of Hoyle in 1800, and American gamblers kept the French name until 'blackjack' replaced it around 1900.
Q 07Which Spanish writer's tale of two card cheats holds the earliest known reference to twenty-one, blackjack's ancestor?
Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes. In 'Rinconete y Cortadillo' a young cheat boasts of living off veintiuna at every inn on the road from Madrid, with a dirty pack that he says never cuts without leaving an ace at the bottom.
Q 08Which actor won an Oscar as Raymond, the savant who counts cards at blackjack in Rain Man?
Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Hoffman. Raymond's memory lets his brother Charlie win enough to clear his debts, though the casino catches the scheme on videotape and asks the pair to leave.
Q 09Where does most of the casino's edge in blackjack come from?
Players must act first
Players must act first. A player who busts loses the bet on the spot, even when the dealer then goes over 21 as well.
Q 10What is each group of blackjack tables in a casino, run by its own boss, called?
A pit
A pit. The pit boss in charge of it is the one called over when a serious dispute breaks out over a hand, or when a player's betting draws suspicion.
Q 11Card historian Thierry Depaulis traced the name 'blackjack' to prospectors in which gold rush?
Klondike
Klondike. Depaulis found gold-seekers in the Yukon of 1896–99 already using the name, and suggested they borrowed it from 'black-jack', the miners' word for a dark zinc ore found near silver and gold.
Q 12In the legend behind blackjack's name, a black jack earned a ten-to-one bonus when paired with which card?
The ace of spades
The ace of spades. The tale is repeated everywhere, yet nobody has produced a record of any gambling house paying such a bonus, and the name was already in use by 1900.
Q 13Blackjack's four basic-strategy pioneers of 1956 share which nickname?
Four Horsemen
Q 21What nickname do casinos give the cameras that record every blackjack hand?
The eye in the sky
The eye in the sky. Its recordings settle disputed hands and catch dealers' mistakes, and they are also how a casino can study a winning player afterwards and spot a card counter.
Q 22What must a blackjack dealer always do with a total of 16?
Draw another card
Draw another card. Dealers have no choices and must keep drawing until they reach 17 or more, which is why a player can sit on a poor total and hope the dealer is forced over 21.
Q 23A blackjack dealer's ace and six make which kind of 17, which some tables require the dealer to hit?
Soft 17
The Four Horsemen. Baldwin, Cantey, Maisel and McDermott, four US Army men, worked the strategy out on desk calculators, and when a computer later checked their answers it found almost nothing to correct.
Q 14Who wrote the 1960s book Beat the Dealer?
Edward Thorp
Edward Thorp. The MIT maths professor tested his card-counting system on an IBM 704 computer, and its success is why casinos now reshuffle well before the last cards are dealt.
Q 15What is the seat at the dealer's far left of a blackjack table called?
First base
First base. Every round starts with that seat, so its player has to decide before seeing how anyone else's hand turns out, while 'third base' at the far end acts last.
Q 16Which moves stay open after a blackjack player's third card?
Hit or stand
Hit or stand. Doubling down, splitting and surrender are first-decision plays, offered only on the opening two cards, so a player who draws first has lost the chance to raise the stakes or bail out.
Q 17In blackjack, what does a player do when doubling down?
Add a matching bet, take one card
Add a matching bet, take one card. Because no further card is allowed, players save the move for strong starts such as a two-card 11, when one more card is likely to be enough.
Q 18What does a blackjack player give up by choosing to surrender?
Half the bet
Half the bet. Giving up is right only with the very worst hands, because even a one-in-four chance of winning the full stake is worth as much as a certain loss of half.
Q 19Which hand signal means 'hit' in a face-up blackjack game?
Tap the table
Tap the table. Casinos require signals instead of spoken words so that the surveillance cameras have a record of every decision and nobody can dispute what the player asked for.
Q 20In blackjack, pointing with two fingers spread in a V signals which decision?
Split
Split. Setting a second bet beside the first is not enough, because another move starts the same way, so the fingers tell the dealer which is meant: two fingers for two hands.
Soft 17. Such a hand cannot bust on the next card, which is why many casinos make their dealers hit it, a rule that adds about 0.2 percentage points to the house edge.
Q 24In blackjack, what is a tie between player and dealer called?
A push
A push. The bet is simply handed back, and that matters more than it sounds: in the rare games where the dealer wins ties instead, the house edge jumps by several points.
Q 25At a standard blackjack table, what brings the offer of insurance?
The dealer shows an ace
The dealer shows an ace. Insurance is a side bet that the dealer's hidden card is worth ten, and because fewer than one card in three is, basic strategy says never to take it.
Q 26In blackjack, what does a winning insurance bet pay?
2 to 1
2 to 1. The side bet is capped at half the stake, so a win exactly covers the main bet lost to the dealer's blackjack, which is how a poor wager came to be sold as protection.
Q 27What is taking insurance with a blackjack of your own called?
Even money
Even money. The dealer pays the hand 1 to 1 on the spot, so the player gives up the usual bonus for a win that a dealer blackjack can no longer turn into a tie, a trade that loses over time.
Q 28With basic strategy, how does blackjack's house edge rank among casino table games?
Among the lowest
Among the lowest. A basic-strategy player loses under 1% of each bet on average, against 5.26% on every spin of an American roulette wheel.
Q 29Many casinos have cut a player's blackjack payout to which odds?
6 to 5
6 to 5. A $10 bet then wins $12, and the short pay adds about 1.4 percentage points to the house edge, more than any other common rule change except paying 1 to 1.
Q 30What do casinos call the box that holds several decks of cards for a blackjack dealer to deal from?
A shoe
A shoe. It lets a casino deal from six or eight decks at once, and the extra decks were brought in partly to speed the game up and partly to blunt card counting.