What is Chinese Blackjack?

Chinese blackjack is a popular gambling game in China and South East Asia. It also known as 21 point, ban nag or ban-luck and it similar to the famous casino game of blackjack. If you are looking for an exciting alternative for playing blackjack, here you can learn the rules of Chinese blackjack.

Chinese blackjack is played with one or two standard 52-card decks. The number of players in a Chinese blackjack game is not limited and one of the players has to be the dealer. The rules and the payoffs in Chinese blackjack game are different depending on where it is played. Here you can find the standard house rules.

The goal of the Chinese blackjack player is to create one of those hand combinations: either pair of aces, called ban ban, an ace and 10 or a face card, called ban nag or total of 15 points.

A Chinese blackjack game begins with all the players placing initial bets. Then the dealer shuffles the cards and asks each player to cut the hand, meaning to take a number of cards from the card deck. All the cards are dealt while they are face down. The dealers deals each player two cards and returns the remaining cards to the cut hand.

The cards ranking in Chinese blackjack is similar to traditional blackjack. The face cards are ranked as 10, while the 2-10 cards worth their face value. Ace card can be 10, 11 or 1, depending on the total number of your cards. For example, if your hand total is 2, an ace card is worth 11 or 10. If it is 3, the ace card is worth 1 or 10 and if it is 4 or more, the ace is worth 1.