
Show HN: Blackjack Break, a minimal quick-play blackjack game - ltiger
https://blackjackbreak.com
======
akersten
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.

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

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

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ltiger
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.

~~~
zxcvbn4038
Very nicely done, enjoyed playing it! My only wish would be to hit after
split, though the way you handled it is perfectly valid.

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

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klausjensen
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...](https://wizardofodds.com/games/blackjack/basics/#toc-
RuleVariations)

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.

~~~
zxcvbn4038
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.

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

~~~
ltiger
Thanks, I'll experiment with this.

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

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udayrddy
this is slick

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

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filoleg
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.

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

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

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hippich
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...](https://www.blackjackapprenticeship.com/blackjack-strategy-
charts/) 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)

~~~
dhbanes
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.

~~~
mtremsal
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.

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

~~~
ltiger
So cool, I love it!

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dhruvdh
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.

~~~
zxcvbn4038
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.

~~~
Zarath
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

~~~
zxcvbn4038
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.

~~~
Zarath
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](https://www.qfit.com/book/ModernBlackjackPage309.htm)

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kimar
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.

~~~
Amorymeltzer
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...](https://github.com/Amorymeltzer/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/blackjack)

2:
[https://github.com/Amorymeltzer/sandbox/blob/master/blackjac...](https://github.com/Amorymeltzer/sandbox/blob/master/blackjackTester.pl)

3:
[https://github.com/Amorymeltzer/sandbox/blob/master/basic_st...](https://github.com/Amorymeltzer/sandbox/blob/master/basic_strategy.pl)
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

~~~
justinsaccount

      perl basic_strategy.pl | column -t

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

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

~~~
jofke
+1

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swalladge
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.

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popup21
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

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

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

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sellingwebsite
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

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

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nodesocket
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?

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herohamp
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

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

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ferros
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.

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

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

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

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

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juice_bus
[https://blackjackbreak.com/about#feedback](https://blackjackbreak.com/about#feedback)

>Dealer shuffles after dealing 75% of the deck

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sc9311
This is sleek! Hopefully hold'em is next up in the queue :)?

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quickthrower2
TIL I suck at blackjack

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

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Canada
Very well done, hands play quicky

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amayne
Very cool. Addictive.

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ltiger
Thanks!

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boraalparat
Loved it. Perfect.

~~~
ltiger
'Preciate it!

