Back to a few more side-bets available for players. The first one is called Bonus Blackjack Online. This is probably the easiest and simplest side bet available, as you’re only betting on whether a blackjack will come up during any hand. You can bet three ways – that the dealer will hit blackjack, any player will hit or both.
There is one addition to just a straight blackjack win/lose, and that’s if you bet both and the player hits blackjack with an Ace and a Jack, it opens a progressive jackpot, a nice little addition that helps the players’ odds here, if only slightly, while adding the enticement of winning more money.
With this bet, it’s important to note that your odds as a player get worse as the number of blackjackrat decks in play increases. So taking that into account, here’s the breakdown of the house edge for each deck count. For one deck, the house has a 22.8% advantage. For two decks, that increases to 23.5%. Four decks is 23.9%. Six decks is 24.02% and eight decks is just about 24.1%. So needless to say, if you want to play this side bet, try to find the fewest amount of decks possible to minimize the house edge.
Now let’s talk about the progressive online blackjack jackpot. This requires the player to pop down an additional $1 (that’s right, a side bet on the side bet). The jackpot usually starts at $25K, and as it increases the house odds decrease, although you’d have to almost jump 10x about 25K to bring the edge down to even. Nevertheless, here’s the breakdown for the return on certain progressive hands.
If the hand yields four red or black aces, you win whatever the progressive jackpot amount is currently at. The odds of this happening are 0.000003% – yes, that’s 5 zeroes. Four aces of any kind pays $2,000 and has a probability of 0.000025% (not much better for a significantly reduced reward). Three suited Aces actually has a lower probability at 0.000015%, but also pays half of four aces at $1,000. Figure that one out. And after that, the blackjack payoffs drop to $200 and less, hardly making it worth your while to even consider betting (for example, 2 non-suited Aces will hit with a percentage of 0.4, but only pays a measly $15 – hell, you get better odds with the Caribbean Stud progressive.