Buster Blackjack Side Bet
The Buster Blackjack side bet is fast becoming one of the most popular blackjack side bets in the world. In what I believe is less than 5 years the Buster Blackjack side bet has flourished in California card room, started booming in land based casinos across the Country and has found a home at several online casinos. This is a pretty amazing rise for a blackjack side bet game and for good reason. Buster Blackjack is a fun side bet that incorporates not only the chance to win a nice sum of money with some luck, but also has a community feel to it due to the fact that everyone at the table, whether you played the side bet or not, wants the dealer to bust. And that’s exactly what the player is betting on with this side bet.
How to Play Buster Blackjack Side Bet
In Buster Blackjack players place their side bet wager prior to the dealing of the cards. The very simple premise is, will the dealer bust. If the dealer busts, everyone who played the bet wins automatically and can win progressively more based on the amount of cards that were used for the dealer to bust. The good thing is, even a three card bust, which is the minimum cards possible to cause a bust, wins something.
House Advantage
A common paytable for Buster Bonus is:
- Dealer Bust with 8+ Cards – 200-1
- Dealer Bust with 7 Cards – 50-1
- Dealer Bust with 6 Cards – 18-1
- Dealer Bust with 5 Cards – 4-1
- Dealer Bust with 3 or 4 Cards – 2-1
Using this paytable and a 6 deck shoe, the house advantage is 4.70%. This is a pretty fair house advantage for a game with a larger payout of 200-1, even though the larger payouts are few and far between. The chances of the dealer busting on any given hand are about 28.5%, so as far as how often a player will win a side bet, Buster Blackjack has a pretty high frequency compared to many other side bets. About 26% of hands will be a dealer bust on 3 or 4 cards. 2% of the time the dealer will bust with 5 cards and the other 0.5% is made up of busts of 6 cards or more.
There are also at least 5 other paytables available for use in Buster Blackjack, but 4 of them are within 0.5% of this paytable and one is just under 1.0% worse, so you won’t find a huge deviation if you find this bet at a casino you are visiting.