21 Burn

21 Burn Blackjack is Betsoft’s multi-hand blackjack built around one gimmick: every hand comes with a face-down Karte verbrennen, and you can trade your second card for it. The mechanic is genuinely novel. The price of admission is not, and it is the first thing you should know: Blackjack wird hier 1:1 ausgezahlt, nicht 3:2.

Play 21 Burn free

The game above is Betsoft’s own demo, running with practice credits in your browser. No account, no download. Everything on this page was read directly from that game’s paytable and rules panel.

The rules, from the game itself

How the burn card works

You are dealt two cards face up plus one face down. Before playing, you may exchange your second card for that face-down burn card, and using it costs an extra half of your original bet. If the burn card turns out to be an ace you are paid on that extra wager: 7:1 for the ace of spades, 2:1 for any other ace. Any other card and the burn wager is simply lost, though you still keep the new card in your hand.

So the burn wager is really two bets at once: a lottery ticket on aces, and a card swap. The lottery half is brutal. At six decks the burn card is the ace of spades 1.9% of the time and another ace 5.8% of the time, so 92.3% of burns lose the wager outright. Priced alone, that pays back about 33 cents per dollar staked. For a burn to be worth it, the swap itself has to be worth more than the roughly third of a unit the wager costs you, which is a very high bar. Save it for hands you genuinely hate, and expect to use it rarely.

What the even-money blackjack costs

This is the number that decides the game. A blackjack normally pays 3:2, and you will be dealt one roughly once every 21 hands. Paying even money instead costs the player about 2.3%, which is more than a 6:5 table takes and several times the entire house edge of a well-run blackjack game.

The underlying rules here are ordinary: our Strategie-Motor prices six decks with a soft-17 hit and doubling on any two cards at roughly 0.7% to 0.8%. Add the even-money blackjack and you are playing something in the region of 3% before you touch the burn card at all. For comparison, the same engine prices a good six-deck game at 0.44%, and our double deck page shows two-deck games at 0.20%.

You will see 99.5% RTP quoted for 21 Burn on game-listing sites. We cannot reconcile that figure with a blackjack that pays even money, and we would rather tell you the rule than repeat the number.

The verdict

The burn card is a good idea and it is fun to use. It is also wrapped around a blackjack game that pays half of what it should on your best hand, with a side wager that returns about a third of what you put in. Play it for the novelty, in small amounts, and go to a 3:2 table when you want the odds. Our free blackjack games und die strategy trainer cost nothing at all.