Blackjack Basic Strategy For Soft Hands

How to Play Soft Hands in Blackjack

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Hard hands: Hard 8 or less - Hard 9 - Hard 10 - Hard 11 - Hard 12 - Hard 13 - 16 - Hard 17 to 21

Soft hands: Soft 13 - 14 - Soft 15 - 16 - Soft 17 - Soft 18 - Soft 19 to 21

Splitting pairs: Aces - 2's - 3's - 4's - 5's - 6's - 7's - 8's - 9's - 10's

Playing Soft Hands in Blackjack

This page consists of general advice about how to play soft hands with perfect basic strategy in blackjack. There are only seven hands you have to concern yourself with in this category, and soft hands will come up less frequently than hard hands. But it's still important that you play these hands correctly.

The first thing you need to understand about soft hands is that it's impossible to bust with a soft hand. There are no "stiff" soft hands. But once the card total gets high enough that the ace must be counted as a one, the hand is no longer a soft hand; it's now a hard hand and should be played with the appropriate strategy for that hard total.

You'll almost always stand on a soft 18 or higher, and you'll always hit a soft 17 or lower. I go into more reasons why in the individual articles for how to play each hand.