Spanish 21

Espagnol 21 is blackjack with a twist that sounds terrible and plays brilliantly: every 10-spot card is removed from the deck, and in exchange you get a stack of player-friendly rules that classic blackjack never offers. Your 21 toujours wins. Your blackjack toujours wins, even against a dealer blackjack. Long hands earn bonus payouts. Played with its correct strategy, Spanish 21 prices up alongside the best blackjack tables in the house.

Play a Spanish-rules game free

The free game at the top of this page is Pirate 21, Nucleus Gaming’s implementation of Spanish-rules blackjack: a 48-card Spanish deck with the bonus 21 payouts, playable in your browser with practice credits. No account, no download, works everywhere. It is one of the real online implementations compared further down this page.

How Spanish 21 differs from blackjack

• The Spanish deck. Six or eight decks of 48 cards: all four 10-spot cards are removed, but jacks, queens and kings stay in. Fewer tens hurts you, which is why everything below is given back.
• Your 21 and blackjack always win. No pushing on 21, and a player blackjack beats a dealer blackjack, still paid at 3:2.
• Bonus 21 payouts. A five-card 21 pays 3:2, six cards pay 2:1, seven or more pay 3:1. A 21 made of 6-7-8 or 7-7-7 pays 3:2 mixed, 2:1 suited, 3:1 in spades. Bonuses are voided if you have doubled.
• Flexible doubling and rescue rules. Spanish 21 typically adds doubling on any number of cards, doubling after a split, and “double down rescue”, taking back half of a doubled bet you no longer like. Implementations vary: Pirate 21, the game above, doubles on any number of cards and lets you resplit and hit aces, but offers no insurance and no surrender.
• The usual price. The dealer typically hits soft 17, which is where the casino claws some value back.

Is Spanish 21 better than blackjack?

With the right strategy it is close, and sometimes better than the blackjack actually offered next to it. Published analyses of the standard rule sets put Spanish 21 at roughly 0.4% house edge when the dealer stands on soft 17 and roughly 0.8% when the dealer hits soft 17, before any table-specific tweaks. The catch is the strategy: the missing tens and the bonus payouts change the correct play for many hands, so a standard blackjack chart gives up real money here. Our moteur stratégique does not model the Spanish deck yet, so we do not publish a Spanish 21 chart; if you play seriously, learn a dedicated one. And skip the Match the Dealer side bet, which carries a far higher edge than the main game.

Where to play for real money

Online, Spanish-rules blackjack lives on through the provider implementations compared below, several of which carry different names on the lobby tile. In US land-based casinos, look for Spanish 21 tables mainly in the west and at tribal casinos; the same felt checks apply as always, starting with the soft 17 rule.