Blackjack Multihand 3 Seats is a blackjack table from the Liège-based studio Gaming1, created in February 2017. You play alone against the dealer, but you can take one, two or three seats at once, each with its own stake and its own cards.
The game's help screen lists a 99.56% return to player, stakes from €1 to €100, a shoe of six 52-card packs shuffled before every game, and rules that leave plenty of choice: double, split, insure or surrender. This page goes through them one by one, along with what they change once three hands are in play.
At a standard table, each round means one hand. Here you decide before every round how many seats you cover, from one to three, and what stake goes on each. Empty seats receive no cards. The ones you take are dealt as if three players sat side by side, except that every decision is yours.
The dealer, meanwhile, has a single hand for the whole table. That is what separates playing several seats from simply playing round after round: your hands face the same upcard and the same final total. When the dealer goes over 21, all your hands still standing win together. When the dealer finishes on 20, they are all under threat at the same moment.
It is also what sets this game apart from the single-hand tables you will find among the other blackjack tables at the casino. Gaming1 has kept the layout easy to read: each hand shows its total next to its cards, so all three seats stay legible, even on a phone screen.
You place a stake on each hand you want to play, then press ‘deal’. Cards go round clockwise and finish with the dealer: each hand receives a first card face up, then a second. The dealer also gets two cards, the second of which stays face down.
You then play your hands one after another. A hand that goes over 21 loses its stake straight away, without waiting for the dealer. Only once all your hands are finished does the dealer turn over the hidden card and complete the hand, drawing on 16 or less and stopping as soon as it reaches 17.
Each hand is then settled separately. A hand wins when it ends nearer 21 than the dealer, or when the dealer has gone over 21. On a tie, your stake comes back. A blackjack, meaning 21 with your first two cards, pays 3 to 2 and beats any other 21, whether it is made of three cards or more or reached after splitting a pair.
For each hand, the help screen describes four actions. Hit adds a card, as many times as you like as long as you stay at 21 or under. Stand locks the hand as it is. Double doubles the stake and gives you one final card. Split turns a pair into two hands, each carrying a stake equal to the original one.
Three limits are specific to this table. You can only stand on more than 11 points: below that, no card can take you over 21, so the rule costs you nothing. Doubling is only allowed on 9, 10 or 11 points made with your first two cards. And if one of them is an ace, it counts as 1 until the end of the hand: doubling on ace-8 means playing a 9, not a 19.
You can split once per seat. Two split aces get one card each, and a 21 reached after a split does not count as a blackjack. With three seats and a split on each, you can therefore have up to six hands in front of you in the same round. For the basics of blackjack splitting, the usual guidelines apply here unchanged.
When the dealer's first card is an ace, the game offers insurance against a possible blackjack. It costs half your stake, sits in its own area apart from the main bet and returns 2 to 1 when the dealer turns out to hold blackjack. If not, it is lost.
Surrender is the other way out. If the dealer's first card is not an ace, your very first action on a hand can be to surrender: the hand ends there and half its stake comes back to you. Once you have taken a card or doubled, the option is gone for that hand.
The rules cover one last case. You hold a blackjack, the dealer shows an ace and has not yet turned over the second card: you can then surrender and take back twice your stake on the spot. You give up the 3 to 2 payout, but avoid the tie that would follow if the dealer also had blackjack. Mathematically, this choice amounts to insuring your own blackjack.
The return shown in the help screen, 99.56%, leaves the house a theoretical edge of 0.44%. On a €10 stake, that comes to just over 4 cents per hand, on average and over a very large number of rounds. Over a few dozen hands, actual results spread far wider, in either direction.
In blackjack, this figure is not a given: it assumes that every decision is the best one available. Standing on 15 against a dealer's 10, passing up a double on 11 or taking insurance out of habit all bring it down. Hence the value of a blackjack strategy learnt before you play: it matches each of your totals, depending on the card the dealer shows, with the move that costs least.
Two things leave this figure unchanged. The number of seats, first: each hand is settled as if it were alone. The shuffle, second: since the six packs are reshuffled before every game, what came out in the previous round says nothing about the next one, and counting cards gets you nowhere.
With a starting stake of €1 per hand, three seats covered at the minimum come to €3 per round. Every double, split and insurance then puts more money on the table: if all three hands double, the round goes from €3 to €6.
The three outcomes are not independent, since they all depend on the dealer's hand. A round where the dealer makes 21 can take all three stakes at once; a round where the dealer busts can pay them all. Three hands at €2 are still not the same as one hand at €6: the amount is the same, but it is spread over three sets of cards and three series of decisions.
If three seats still feel like too few, Gaming1 offers the same table as Blackjack Multihand 7 Seats, with up to seven seats and the same €1 starting stake. Either way, set your session budget before choosing how many seats to play, not the other way round.
Blackjack Multihand 3 Seats launches in demo mode straight from its page, with no account needed. Stakes are fictional and the table follows the rules above: same shoe, same dealer, same options.
It is the right place to get used to three seats: following the order of play, spotting the totals of 9 to 11 that open up a double, seeing when surrender appears and disappears. The demo also lets you apply basic strategy hand by hand, without each mistake costing you anything.
An interrupted game, for example after a dropped connection, can be resumed if it was not finished; in the event of a technical malfunction, the games and payouts concerned are cancelled.
To play with real euros, open a Casino King account, have it verified, then make a first deposit. The table then opens from the same page, on desktop and mobile alike, with the same rules and the same 99.56% return.
When a session ends in profit, Casino King lets you withdraw your winnings straight away: after your bank account has been checked and approved, the transfer lands within seconds, even on a Sunday evening.
Three hands, one dealer and rules set out in black and white: Blackjack Multihand 3 Seats is waiting for you at Casino King, the Belgium online casino whose B+19763 licence appears in the Gaming Commission's register. Play is restricted to over-21s.