Blackjack Surrender

Blackjack Surrender LogoBlackjack Surrender has one key difference to a regular game of blackjack – you have the ability to end the game early and claim back half of your stake if you don’t like your starting hand.

It’s a Playtech title using six decks and with the ability to play up to 5 hands in any single game round, with a minimum bet of £1 and a maximum bet of £5,000.

There are one or two other rules to be aware of but for the most part this is a simple variation which any semi-experienced blackjack player won’t find too challenging.

Game Rules

Blackjack Surrender

Other than the surrender option, the game follows the Las Vegas Strip rules with the exceptions outlined below:

  • Dealer draws to 16 and stands on all 17s.
  • Dealer will check for blackjack if up card is an Ace or has value of 10.
  • Insurance offered before dealer checks for blackjack.
  • Player can only split once.
  • Doubling after splitting permitted.
  • Only one further card drawn to split Aces.

The 7 Car Charlie rule is also in operation, whereby if the player draws 7 cards without going bust their hand is an automatic winner so long as the dealer does not have blackjack. This can be on a regular hand or a split hand.

All game payouts and other rules are as standard.

Surrender

If the player does not fancy their chances with the hand they have been dealt they have the option to ‘surrender’ their hand.

This stops the game going any further and the dealer will return half of the stake. Anyone playing using optimal strategy will know what the weakest hands in the game are when compared to the dealer’s up card, so this might be when the surrender option would be used.

Blackjack Surrender Option

In our example above we have been dealt a 3 of spades and a 9 of diamonds giving us a hand value of 12, while the dealer’s up card is a 2 of clubs. The option to surrender pops up alongside the hit and stand options. We have highlighted it in yellow.

Surrendering may not be the optimal move here, but for the purposes of the article we will surrender so that you can see what happens.

Blackjack Surrendered

It turns out the dealer had a 9 of clubs, but that is irrelevant since we surrendered the hand. You can see the word ‘Surrendered’ below the hand, and we have also highlighted our returned chip worth 50p in the bottom left of the screen, both also in yellow.

This will obviously display the value that is half of whatever your stake was, it’s just that we bet £1 on the hand so 50p is what we get back.

RTP

Assuming the player is using a perfect strategy the theoretical return to player percentage of Blackjack Surrender is 99.66% which is pretty much average for blackjack.

This means you get the surrender option without any real damage to the RTP, and you never have to use it at all if you don’t want to.

It’s a good game then for players who prefer to play only their stronger hands and will happily cut their losses rather than play out the weaker hands.