Blackjack A blackjack example, consisting of an ace and a 10-valued card Alternative names Twenty-One Type Comparing Players 2+, usually 😆 2–7 Skills Probability Cards 52 to 416 (one to eight 52-card decks) Deck French Play Clockwise Chance High Related games 😆 Pontoon, twenty-one, Siebzehn und Vier, vingt-et-un

Blackjack (formerly black jack and vingt-un) is a casino banking game.[1]: 342 It is the 😆 most widely played casino banking game in the world. It uses decks of 52 cards and descends from a global 😆 family of casino banking games known as "twenty-one". This family of card games also includes the European games vingt-et-un and 😆 pontoon, and the Russian game Ochko [ru].[2] Blackjack players do not compete against each other. The game is a comparing 😆 card game where each player competes against the dealer.

History [ edit ]

Blackjack's immediate precursor was the English version of twenty-one 😆 called vingt-un, a game of unknown (but likely Spanish) provenance. The first written reference is found in a book by 😆 the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes was a gambler, and the protagonists of his "Rinconete y Cortadillo", from Novelas 😆 Ejemplares, are card cheats in Seville. They are proficient at cheating at veintiuna (Spanish for "twenty-one") and state that the 😆 object of the game is to reach 21 points without going over and that the ace values 1 or 11. 😆 The game is played with the Spanish baraja deck.

"Rinconete y Cortadillo" was written between 1601 and 1602, implying that ventiuna 😆 was played in Castile since the beginning of the 17th century or earlier. Later references to this game are found 😆 in France and Spain.[3]