Shoe (Mind Loft)

Shoe is a blackjack puzzle on Mind Loft, a free site of daily browser games. Each day one shoe of 72 cards is cut from two standard decks, and every player is dealt the same cards in the same order across ten hands. Because the cards are fixed, blackjack stops being a gamble and becomes a decision game that a leaderboard can rank.

The rules are kept simple. Each hand is a 10-chip stake, and you can hit, stand, double or split a pair. The dealer stands on every 17, a blackjack pays 3 to 2. The header tracks your bank, the hand number and the cards left in the shoe. On the day we looked, the first hand was a soft 14 (ace and three) against a dealer showing 7.

Par is what basic strategy, the book line, would bank on the day's shoe if played without looking at past cards. Matching par scores 8 out of 10. The ace line, the best a blind player could do, scores 10; that day par was -10 chips and the ace line +50. To beat the book you count: with only 72 cards in the shoe, every card dealt changes what is left, and a player who keeps track will sometimes stand where the book says hit.

A new shoe is dealt at midnight US Eastern Time. On Sundays it grows to fourteen hands from the whole 104-card double deck, where a perfect counter knows exactly what remains. Mind Loft's other card dailies include Taire (solitaire) and Hands (poker solitaire).