Dealer Busts Side Bet

It’s always fun to bet on the dealer busting. After all, that’s what we hope happens every hand. So it’s an added bonus when a side bet comes along that allows up to directly bet on that happening on top of our normal blackjack bet.

Here’s how it works. You put your side bet down, as usual, and if the dealer busts, you collect! How much you win depends on how many cards the dealer takes before busting. The more cards it takes for him to go over, the richer your reward will be. Here’s a breakdown, as usual, of the probabilities and return potential of this side bet. This is for a standard, six deck game where the dealer must hit on a soft 17. The overall house edge is 6.21% (no surprise, all side bets have worse house odds than just playing straight up blackjack).

Your best possible outcome is if the dealer busts with eight or more cards. It’s extremely unlikely to happen (try 0.0012% of the time), but if it does, you’ll get 250:1 back on your bet, making for a 0.3 percent return probability. If the dealer busts with 7 cards, your reward drops five-fold to 50:1. The odds of this happening are a paltry 0.02 percent. If the dealer busts with six cards, you get 12:1 back; the odds of this are 0.26 percent. Busting with five cards gets you 4:1, a 2% chance. Busting with 4 cards gives you 2:1 back, and has about a 9% chance of happening on any given hand. Busting with 3 cards also gives you back 2:1 on your get, and will happen about 17.3% of the time. And, obviously, you lose if the dealer doesn’t bust.

Now, depending on the number of decks and whether the soft 17 rule applies, you could be looking at up to an 8.7 house advantage. But, to be honest, that part of it shouldn’t really matter. Because the odds are so horrible for anything with a reasonable payoff, it’s hard to recommend even trying this one. The house odds might only show around 7%, but it’s a loser’s gamble as far as I’m concerned. There are far better and more fun side bets to take advantage of when you’re at the tables.