The Side Bets
Every blackjack table now carries two or three extra circles, and the pitch is always the same: a small wager, a big payout, a bit of fun alongside a game with almost no house edge left in it. This page prices all four of the common ones exactly — every published pay table, at every deck count — and the answer is not close.
The best side bet on the felt keeps 3.24% of what you put on it. The main game keeps 0.4568%. That is 7.1× as expensive for the best of them and 54× for the worst.
House edge at six decks, every published pay table · the dashed line is the main game at 0.4568%
The name is not the bet
Look at how many times the same name appears in that chart at different heights. A house edge quoted for “21+3” with no pay table attached is the same offence as a house edge quoted with no rule set attached: at six decks it runs from 3.24% to 13.39% — a factor of 4.1 — with the same logo on the felt and the same cards in your hand. The only thing that changed is the little printed table nobody reads.
That is the one genuinely actionable thing on this page. You cannot play these bets well, but you can read the pay table before you put money on one, and the difference between the good version and the bad version of the same bet is larger than the difference between two different bets.
More decks is better, which is backwards
Everything about the main game says fewer decks is better for the player. Every single one of the 12 multi-deck pay tables here does the opposite: Perfect Pairs’s worst table goes from 54.90% at 1 deck to 3.37% at 8.
The reason is the same in every case, and it is the neatest fact here: these bets pay for duplicate cards — matching ranks, matching suits, three of a kind — and duplicates only exist because the shoe holds more than one deck. The cleanest demonstration is Perfect Pairs, whose top tier is the identical card twice over. In a single deck that is not unlikely, it is impossible: there is no second ace of spades. Add decks and you are not improving your odds on a fixed bet, you are creating the outcomes the bet pays for.
The four bets
Perfect Pairs
Pays if your first two cards are a pair, more if they match in colour, most if they are the identical card twice.
4.18%–9.97% at six decks, across 4 pay tables · wins 7.4% of hands
21+3
Scores your two cards plus the dealer’s up-card as a three-card poker hand.
3.24%–13.39% at six decks, across 3 pay tables · wins 9.7% of hands
Royal Match
Pays if your first two cards are the same suit, and much more if they are a suited king and queen.
3.70%–6.67% at six decks, across 2 pay tables · wins 24.8% of hands
Lucky Ladies
Pays on a two-card 20, with bigger tiers the more exactly your two cards match.
6.22%–24.71% at six decks, across 3 pay tables · wins 10.6% of hands
How these were worked out
Nothing here is simulated. Each figure is an exact count of combinations over a suited shoe — 52 distinct cards with one copy per deck — which is why it can be checked against a published table to the last decimal, and all of it was. The enumeration is proved complete a second way: every run totals the combinations it has classified and requires that sum to equal the number of ways to pick those cards from the shoe.
That care matters more than usual here, because the obvious way to count a three-card bet is a trap. A suited three of a kind is simultaneously a three of a kind and a flush, so subtracting overlaps one at a time quietly misses it and produces a confident, plausible, wrong number. Counting the categories disjointly in precedence order cannot make that mistake.
One pay table is deliberately shown at a single deck only. Extrapolated to six it computes to a player advantage, which is arithmetically true and describes a bet no casino deals; printing it would be publishing a beatable side bet that does not exist.
Sources for every pay table are on the individual pages. None of this is advice to play these bets — the arithmetic here is an argument against all of them, and the only useful move is reading the pay table before you decide.