Place your bet, draw toward 21, and outplay the dealer with smart hits, stands, doubles, and splits, just don't go bust.
Blackjack is the classic casino card game where you build a hand worth as close to 21 as possible without exceeding it, while beating the dealer's hand. Number cards count their face value, face cards count ten, and an Ace is one or eleven. Place a chip bet, deal, then choose your actions. Bust over 21 and you lose; otherwise the higher total wins, and a two-card 21 is a blackjack.
The game reaches print in fiction before it does in any rulebook. Its ancestor is twenty-one, and the first written reference appears in Miguel de Cervantes — himself a gambler — whose Novelas ejemplares story "Rinconete y Cortadillo" follows two card cheats in Seville who are expert at veintiuno. Cervantes has them state the rules: reach 21 without going over, and the ace counts 1 or 11.
That story was written between 1601 and 1602, which puts the game in Castile by the beginning of the 17th century at the latest. The first actual rules were printed in Britain in 1800, under the French name vingt-un, and the game crossed to the United States in the early 1800s — the first American rules being a reprint of the English ones.
The name is younger than the game. English vingt-un developed into a distinct American variant that was renamed blackjack around 1899. The familiar explanation — that houses paid a bonus for an ace with a black jack — is recorded as popular myth rather than documented fact, and the sources repeating it cannot agree on which decade it is meant to describe.
Blackjack is the world's most popular banking card game, a blend of quick arithmetic and risk decisions. This is an original, free browser version with a six-deck shoe, 3:2 payouts, doubles, splits, and insurance, no download, sign-up, or real money involved.