Beat the House on your phone

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.

Set the table

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

A hand at the table

The dealer's upcard, your hand, and the moves. An action you cannot take stays on screen and goes flat rather than disappearing, so the layout never shifts under your thumb mid-round. 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.

When you miss

In Learning the wrong move becomes the lesson. The hand stops and the app shows what you chose, the basic-strategy play, and why that play wins more over the long run: the dealer's odds of breaking, what the extra wager buys, whatever actually decides the cell.

The correction waits for you, so the mistake does not simply disappear into a session score. Game Play grades every decision just as closely and says nothing until the report.

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.

Analyze any hand

You do not have to wait for a hand to turn up at the table. Build one: set the dealer's upcard and your own cards, then ask the chart. Beat the House names the basic-strategy move and explains the reasoning behind it: the odds underneath the cell, not just the letter in it.

Play out hand deals the rest of it if you want to see how it lands. Nothing is wagered here and nothing is recorded, so it never touches your rating.

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.

Past sessions

Every session you have played, with tabs for Most recent and Best rating. 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.

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.