Deal or No Deal Blackjack

Deal or No Deal Blackjack logoJust like the TV game show, Deal or No Deal Blackjack includes an offer from the ‘banker’ after each hand has been dealt, which the player can choose to accept or decline.

The value of each offer will obviously be higher for a strong hand and lower for a poor hand, but in some scenarios could guarantee you a profit on your stake without having to play any further.

This profit would be smaller than what you would get from a winning hand, however, which is the dilemma the game presents.

It is played with 8 decks and up to three hands can be played at the same time.

How the Game Works: Walkthrough

It is usually more informative to show the game in practice than to simply talk about it, so we will run through an example hand below.

Deal or No Deal Blackjack Table

Here is the table at the start of each game. It is actually exactly the same as a regular blackjack table, the extra’s you can see like the box and the phone have no function and only serve as set dressing.

We have put a £1 bet on the next hand, let’s see what we get.

Deal or No Deal Blackjack Offer

You can see the dealer has an upturned 7 and we have a total hand value of 12, which is a fairly safe hand to hit on – only a 10 value card would be really bad news for us and end our game, but a low number like a 2 or a 3 could put us in a trickier position.

The banker is offering us 78p to end the game now, which would mean a 22p loss on our stake of £1. Considering we stand to take £2 if we win we decide to decline the banker’s offer and hit.

Deal or No Deal Blackjack Result

In this instance we made the right decision. Our 3rd card is an 8 giving us a total hand value of 20, so we will leave it there.

We went on to win the hand as the dealer hit 17 and had to stand.

Game Rules

That takes us nicely onto the game rules outside of the Deal or No Deal element.

Here are the basics for this game:

  • Dealer draws to 16, stands on 17
  • Can only split once
  • Doubling allowed after splitting
  • Split Aces can only hit once
  • Blackjack beats 21

So pretty standard stuff really.

Additional Features

Deal or No Deal Blackjack Book SaysThese features do not affect gameplay or the rules but rather how you will experience the game. They are worth mentioning because you don’t always get these options with other blackjack games.

For instance the option to turn off insurance is available, meaning you will never be offered it. The same goes for bet warnings which notify you if you are making a risk move, for example hitting on 17.

You can even switch of the deal or no deal aspect, which makes the game a little redundant if you ask us but there you are.

The most interesting feature is ‘The Book Says’, which tells you what you should do based on the basic strategy table which you can see an example of to the right.

This table is available to view in the game rules and recommends what action the player should take in any given situation.

RTP

For this game, the theoretical return to player percentage is 99.33%.

This is based on the player using the optimal strategy as touched on above, and will also depend on how happy you are to take the banker’s offer or not.

Deal or No Deal

Deal or No Deal TV Show

Deal or No Deal was first introduced to the British public in 2005, when Noel Edmonds fronted the TV show that would run for over a decade.

It was based on a Dutch TV show called Hunt for Millions when has since been sold all over the world, although only 9 people ever won the top prize of £250k during the show’s 11 year tenure on UK television, and one of those occurred on the very last episode.

The show was such a hit that it has been used as inspiration for almost every game you could imagine, not just blackjack. There are slots, bingo rooms, board games, live casino games, computer games, as well as all kinds of merchandise all based on the Deal or No Deal format.