You follow basic strategy and hit your soft 13 but draw a Jack. Suppose, for instance, you start with a two-card hand consisting of A-2 whose total is either 3 or 13, it is up to you to decide. While at the blackjack table, you will face multiple situations where you start with a soft hand which transforms into a hard one after you take one or more hits. In contrast, soft hands are those that contain an Ace that counts as 1 or 11 depending on the player’s preferences. Otherwise, the player would exceed 21 and lose the round.

A hand like A-4-10-3 with a total of 18 is also hard despite the presence of the Ace because here, it counts as 1. An example of an Aceless hard hand is K-6 which makes for a hard total of 16. So what is the distinction between soft and hard hands? Hard hands in blackjack either do not contain an Ace or when they do, the Ace is assigned a value of 1 and cannot be counted as 11. In the following article, we shall be looking at the key differences between soft and hard hands in blackjack, explain which of the two are more valuable to players, and expound the logic behind several important playing decisions. The thing is optimal playing decisions vary vastly for soft and hard hands even if their total is identical. You will encounter these two terms across a vast range of books and strategy articles but reading all the blackjack literature in the world amounts to nothing if you fail to make a proper distinction between the two main types of hands in this beautiful game of probabilities.

What is a soft hand blackjack