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Show HN: Blackjack Break, a minimal quick-play blackjack game
- ltiger 7y agoFrom the about page: Towards the end of 2017, I found myself wanting to play a quick game of something while I was working. That something turned out to be blackjack. I tried a few web-based games and downloaded a bunch to my phone. All of them either felt kinda scammy, were hard to look at, or just played way too slow. I like making things, so I made Blackjack Break. I hope it's a fun diversion for you like it is for me.
- zxcvbn4038 7y agoVery nicely done, enjoyed playing it! My only wish would be to hit after split, though the way you handled it is perfectly valid.
- ltiger 7y agoThanks, never played in a casino - Are the left and right hand cards hit immediately after splitting?
- klausjensen 7y agoIt depends. The rules vary from casino to casino. :) The Wizard of Odds has a very thorough walk-through of the variations of rules - and what they mean to the odds: https://wizardofodds.com/games/blackjack/basics/#toc-RuleVariations https://wizardofodds.com/games/blackjack/basics/#toc-RuleVar... Brings back memories from playing many, many hours of playing optimal strategy blackjack to release generous bonuses from online casinos. :) Well done on launching btw. I second the UI suggestions about making UI a bit easier.
- zxcvbn4038 7y agoI was impressed by the online casinos using real dealers and those scannable oversized cards. I don’t think I would have gone that route but great that people are employed and I guess that puts to bed any discussion about algorithms or if the computer is dealing under to itself. Wizard Of Odds is an amazing guy, I love the articles on his site.
- zxcvbn4038 7y agoMy wish has been granted, I can play the hands after split now, very nice
- optimiz3 7y agoIt would be nice if it told you after finishing a hand if you deviated from basic strategy. Also would be nice if some of the more common rule variants where settable (DAS, S/H17, etc.).
- amayne 7y agoVery cool. Addictive.
- ltiger 7y agoThanks!
- krzjn 7y agoNice game. Would be nice to know when the deck gets shuffled for card counting purposes :)
- kimar 7y agoVery nice. Any plans on open-sourcing this? I'm a newbie at blackjack and have been wanting to build a similarly minimalistic version adding a "strategy feedback" mode to help me memorize basic strategies.
- Amorymeltzer 7y agoI've got a simple blackjack program[1] in bash that I occasionally play; it's ugly code, but it's pretty straightforward. More directly, I wrote (perl) a blackjack tester[2] to quiz myself, as well as a simple output of basic strategy[3]. I haven't touched these in half a decade, but seem to work fine! 1: https://github.com/Amorymeltzer/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/blackjack https://github.com/Amorymeltzer/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/bla... 2: https://github.com/Amorymeltzer/sandbox/blob/master/blackjackTester.pl https://github.com/Amorymeltzer/sandbox/blob/master/blackjac... 3: https://github.com/Amorymeltzer/sandbox/blob/master/basic_strategy.pl https://github.com/Amorymeltzer/sandbox/blob/master/basic_st... but I recommend running it as perl basic_strategy.pl | awk '{printf "%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\n", $1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6, $7, $8, $9, $10, $11;}'` for nicer output
- justinsaccount 7y agoperl basic_strategy.pl | column -t
- Amorymeltzer 7y agoIndeed, but the broader spacing from awk is easier on the eyes
- dhruvdh 7y agoIs this open source? I kinda want to try training a Blackjack AI, and the clean minimal design for here could help if I try giving the game state to the AI as an image. Also it would be fun to play with data of everyone's games if you're collecting them.
- meritt 7y ago> clean minimal design The design is so minimal I thought it wasn't loading correctly for me.
- ltiger 7y agoSeems I may have taken the minimal aesthetic too far :)
- zxcvbn4038 7y agoIf your AI is any good it will refuse to play because it’s realized the house always wins. I spent a few hours watching card counting videos on YouTube to see if there was anything to it - didn’t matter who it was, they spent the entire time belly-aching because other players were getting “their” cards. Amazing how all these card counting schemes depend on everyone else playing perfect basic strategy.
- Zarath 7y agoCard counting schemes have almost nothing to do with the cards of others. I have no idea who you were watching but they sound like frauds. It's trivially easy to verify that counting systems work in theory. If you have a sufficiently good counting system, you will know exactly the cards remaining in the deck (Suppose I knew only 8s were left in the deck. I just never hit and let the dealer bust continually). Even the best human-capable counting systems only have an edge of 1-2%, meaning that you still need to get lucky or have a ton of time and a near infinite bankroll (minimize risk of ruin). Having more players at the table hurts the efficiency of the count because more cards come out between when you place your bet, and when you receive both of your cards. This means that the correlation between the count when you place your bet, and the hand you receive, decreases. House edge at good casinos is normally below 1%, and you're telling me an AI with perfect information couldn't beat a dealer whose moves are incapable of changing given new information? Source: I've card counted for 6-7 years now
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- boraalparat 7y agoLoved it. Perfect.
- ltiger 7y ago'Preciate it!
- techdevangelist 7y agoThis would be a great candidate for automatic light/dark mode with the prefers-color-scheme css option.
- ltiger 7y agoThanks, I'll experiment with this.
- Canada 7y agoVery well done, hands play quicky
- akersten 7y agoNice game. I'm glad you identified the major problem in many online blackjack toys - that they've got a scummy vibe to them - and done a clean break from that. Some ideas: * Keyboard shortcuts would be welcome - the click targets are grouped together on desktop and are not very large. * Upscaling the game on desktop would be helpful for usability, it's quite small currently. * I know it's just a hobby project, but it seems the action buttons are not in the tab order - was this deliberately removed? This seems like it would be a really easy step to take for at least minimal accessibility. Currently, a mouse is required on desktop due to this problem.
- ltiger 7y agoExcellent suggestions, thanks! Any key recommendations for the shortcuts?
- mindfulmonkey 7y agohjkl; or anything that can be done one-handed, preferably on the home row
- ondarkness 7y agoI was looking for this! Works great on the Tesla touch screen while charging.
- ltiger 7y agoSo cool, I love it!
- aklemm 7y agoVery nice! It might slightly more comfortable to play if the dealer and player were differentiated better. Is the source code available?
- jofke 7y ago+1
- exogeny 7y agoVery nice! The only thing I would recommend is after splitting, showing both hands even though the action is only on one of them.
- quickthrower2 7y agoTIL I suck at blackjack
- MichaelStubbs 7y agoHah, interesting to see this here. I'm actually working on this but for mobile devices.
- filoleg 7y agoIs there something like this, but for poker? The issues described by the author with most of the already existing offers are the exact same ones i have. I just want a poker game that isn’t slow, doesnt feel scammy with tons of dark patterns and microtransactions, and has a clean and simple UX. Great job btw, i definitely dig the overall feel of the app.
- thebeeperking 7y agoMakes me recall “BytesJack” from the old 10kb build competition: http://heliom.github.io/bytesjack/ http://heliom.github.io/bytesjack/
- udayrddy 7y agothis is slick
- thebeeperking 7y agoKeyboard controls, responsive design, no images (I don’t think), pseudo elements, and all weighing in under 10kb.
- binarymax 7y agoNice! Is the deck ‘infinite’ or are you shuffling a set amount of decks together and dealing from the limited set?
- herohamp 7y agoThe deck has 52 cards and is shuffled once 75% of the cards have been delt
- jliptzin 7y agoOf course when I play fake blackjack I make 10x my initial bankroll within 5 minutes.
- nodesocket 7y agoWould be awesome if you could turn on basic strategy suggestions for each hand to help teach it. How many decks is this based off, or is it random from a single deck each deal?
- popup21 7y agoMinimal is good. I went the other way. A bit relevent to this subject matter is a redesign of blackjack I finished awhile ago. I wanted to make game characters out of the cards and put the player in a dungeon-like environment rather than the generic game table. Still working on v2, mainly updates to the graphics. I put it on itch.io and you can download it for Mac, Windows, and Linux. popup21.itch.io/popup21
- scotch_drinker 7y agoJust in time for re:Invent! Thanks. :-)
- ferros 7y agoI don’t know if it’s just me, but on iOS I have to double tap the links sometimes to get them to fire.
- ltiger 7y agoI'll increase the clickable area of the links. That may fix this.
- herohamp 7y agoNice game. I really enjoy how simple it is. Is there a reason it's not a PWA? I would love to be able to install it with offline play
- hippich 7y agoGreat job! For people not very into BJ - there are rules available with pretty binary decisions trees (depending on rules). Quick google search brought https://www.blackjackapprenticeship.com/blackjack-strategy-charts/ https://www.blackjackapprenticeship.com/blackjack-strategy-c... but there are plenty of other resources. Essentially, I believe there is always a perfect strategy available that should guarantee profit (given unlimited cash available to play unlimited game)
- dhbanes 7y agoWithout counting (which is not possible with this version since there is no shoe or deck to count from), optimal (basic) strategy will guarantee a loss in the long run. If there was a basic strategy which guaranteed profit for the player, no casino would offer this game.
- folli 7y agoThe perfect strategy is called "being the house"
- mtremsal 7y agoWith the set of rules implemented here, including early surrender and double after split, it seems perfect basic strategy, even without counting, gives a very minimal edge to the player. Also, this version lets you count cards, since it uses a single deck and displays shuffles.
- sc9311 7y agoThis is sleek! Hopefully hold'em is next up in the queue :)?
- swalladge 7y agoThis is really nice! It reminds me of a similar site I played on ages back that supported online play for several different card games - it had a similar minimal, clean design. (Wish I could find it again.) I agree, often I look for a card games online, but they are mostly bloated, full of ads, require accounts, really spammy. Refreshing to see this.
- sellingwebsite 7y agoGreat minimalistic interface. Two suggestions: * Dark mode * Add short instructions on how to play Blackjack. Im familiar with twenty-one but not with Blackjack so it'd be nice to have it there. I had to read Wiki page to play it