Blackjack Bust Odds Chart
Two different bust questions: how likely are you to bust by taking one more card on a stiff hand like a hard 16, and how likely is the dealer to eventually bust given what they’re showing?
Soft totals aren’t shown because they can never bust on a single hit — the highest possible card is worth 10, and a soft total is always 11 or less before its ace bonus, so even the worst case (11 + 10) lands exactly on 21.
Why your bust odds are a straight line
The player chart is the rare probability curve with no curve in it. Each total is exactly 7.69 percentage points worse than the one below it, all the way up — and that number is not a coincidence, it is 1/13.
There are thirteen ranks in a deck, and a hard 12 busts against exactly four of them: the ten, jack, queen and king. So the chance is 4/13, or 30.77%. Move up to a hard 13 and the nine joins the list, making five ranks out of thirteen. Every total you climb recruits exactly one more rank, and one rank is always 7.69% of the deck. Hence the straight line.
Worth being explicit about what that model does and does not know: it treats every rank as equally likely, which is what a freshly shuffled shoe looks like. It does not track which cards have already gone, so it is not a counting model — the true figure drifts from this one as a shoe is dealt out, in whichever direction the removed cards happened to fall.
The dealer’s curve is the one that matters
Your own bust chance is the easy half, and on its own it argues for standing on everything. The reason basic strategy tells you to hit a hard 16 against a dealer ten is that standing does not make your hand better — it just hands the decision to a dealer who is very likely to make a good one.
The dealer’s bust chance peaks at 6 showing, at 42.3%, and bottoms out against an Ace at 11.5%. Those are the two ends of every decision you make at the table.
The sharpest moment on that curve is between 6 and 7, where the dealer’s bust chance falls by 16.1 points in a single step. That cliff is why the basic-strategy chart changes character so abruptly across those columns: on one side the dealer is likely enough to destroy their own hand that standing on a stiff total is right, and on the other they are not, so you have to improve yours.
It also explains the ace. A dealer showing an ace busts only 11.5% of the time, 3.7x less often than with a 6 showing, because an ace is the one up-card that cannot be pushed over 21 by a ten — it simply becomes a soft hand instead.
What the dealer’s own rule changes
Switch the toggle above from Dealer Stands on Soft 17, DAS, pays 3:2 to Dealer Hits Soft 17, DAS, pays 3:2 and the dealer’s bust rate goes up — against 6 it rises from 42.3% to 43.9%, a gain of 1.6 points for you. Which looks like good news and is not.
A dealer forced to hit a soft 17 busts more often, but they also improve more often, and on balance the second effect wins: hitting soft 17 is a rule that costs the player money despite raising the bust rate. That is the clearest example on this site of why a single number is not a strategy — the rule impact page puts a figure on what it actually costs, and the basic strategy chart is what to do about it.
“The dealer always has 20”
Busting is one of six things a dealer hand can do, and the other five are where most of the table folklore lives. Below is the whole distribution: where the dealer actually finishes, from each up-card, conditioned on her having already checked and not got blackjack — which is the only world you ever make a decision in.
| Up-card | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | Bust |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 14.0 | 13.5 | 13.0 | 12.4 | 11.8 | 35.4 |
| 3 | 13.5 | 13.0 | 12.5 | 12.1 | 11.5 | 37.4 |
| 4 | 13.0 | 12.4 | 12.1 | 11.7 | 11.2 | 39.6 |
| 5 | 12.2 | 12.2 | 11.8 | 11.2 | 10.8 | 41.8 |
| 6 | 16.6 | 10.6 | 10.6 | 10.2 | 9.7 | 42.3 |
| 7 | 36.9 | 13.8 | 7.9 | 7.9 | 7.4 | 26.2 |
| 8 | 12.9 | 36.0 | 12.9 | 6.9 | 6.9 | 24.4 |
| 9 | 12.1 | 11.7 | 35.2 | 12.0 | 6.1 | 22.9 |
| 10 | 12.1 | 12.1 | 12.1 | 36.9 | 3.8 | 23.0 |
| Ace | 18.8 | 18.9 | 18.9 | 18.9 | 7.8 | 16.6 |
| All | 15.3 | 14.6 | 14.0 | 18.9 | 7.6 | 29.6 |
Where the dealer finishes, % · 6 decks · Dealer Stands on Soft 17, DAS, pays 3:2 · given no dealer blackjack
The myth is half true, and only from one up-card. A ten showing finishes on exactly 20 36.9% of the time — far and away the most likely single result, and the reason the complaint exists. From a 8 it is 6.9%, or 5.3x less often. Across every up-card together the dealer lands on 20 just 18.9% of the time, which is less often than she busts.
The row that actually matters for the hands people argue about is the 7: it finishes 17 exactly 36.9% of the time, more than any other cell in the table. That single number is why a 7 up is the pivot of the whole strategy chart — it is the up-card most likely to make the lowest standing total, so almost any hand that can beat 17 is worth playing out against it.