Documentation

Beat the House on iPhone

Everything the app does, in the order you will meet it.

Where you land

The front page

Your Strategy Rating sits at the top, with the accuracy, experience and difficulty behind it. Two tabs keep the modes apart — Learning Stats and Game Stats are rated separately and never mixed.

Below that: the cell you most often miss, your last session, and the way in to everything else.

The front page showing a Strategy Rating of 90.2, the most-missed cell, and the last session.
The Set the table screen with sliders for starting bankroll, minimum bet and shoe size.
Game Play

Set the table

Before a game-play session you choose what you are sitting down to:

Starting bankroll$100, $250, $500 or $1,000
Minimum betNone, $5, $10, $25 or $50
ShoeFour, six or eight decks

Why no single- or double-deck game? Basic strategy for one and two decks differs from the multi-deck chart in about a dozen cells. Offering those shoes would mean grading your hands against strategy that is wrong for them.

Playing

A hand at the table

The dealer's upcard, your hand, and only the actions actually legal right now — no greyed-out buttons for plays you cannot make. In Game Play you place chips yourself; in Learning the wager is fixed so every hand carries the same weight.

Your running accuracy sits in the rail at the top alongside the balance and the bet, so you always know how the session is going before the report tells you.

A hand in progress showing the dealer upcard, the player hand and the available actions.
The basic strategy chart, with hard totals, soft totals and pairs.
Reference

The strategy chart

The whole chart — hard totals, soft totals and pairs — indexed to the exact rules the app deals. The cells you personally keep getting wrong are flagged, drawn from every session you have played rather than just the last one.

A pair of tens is a pair. Splitting is by card value, not rank, so King-Queen is a splittable pair of tens at the table and on the chart. The app will offer you the split and mark taking it as a mistake, because standing on twenty is right. Withholding the option would train you for a table that does not exist.

Afterwards

The session report

Every session is shadowed by a simulation of flawless basic strategy playing the very same shoe. The report puts the two side by side: what happened, and what should have.

You also get this session's own rating judged on its own, your current rating, and which way this session moved it. The movement is your rating after the session minus your rating before it — not the session score compared to your standing one, which would measure nothing.

A session report comparing actual play against perfect strategy on the same shoe.
The past sessions list.
History

Past sessions

Every session you have played, best first. Open any one for its full hand history, its decisions, and every call you got wrong in the order you made them.

Drills finished on your Apple Watch appear here too, in Learning history, labelled with where they came from.

Learning the game

How to play, and what the words mean

If blackjack itself is new to you, the rules, the moves and the shape of a hand are explained from scratch. A glossary covers the language at the table — soft and hard totals, the shoe, the cut card, surrender, and the rest.

Insurance is deliberately absent. It is a side bet, basic strategy declines it every time, and presenting it as a normal option would teach a habit worth unlearning.

The How to play reference screen.

Next: the wrist

The Apple Watch app runs short drills that feed the same Learning rating.