Most blackjack and baccarat games deal from a shoe of six or eight decks rather than a single pack. The reason is practical: fewer shuffles, faster dealing, and much harder card counting.
Deck count changes the maths slightly and not always in the direction people expect. In blackjack, fewer decks favour the player by roughly half a percentage point. In baccarat, the pair side bets are marginally better on eight decks than six.
The important caveat is that a single-deck blackjack game paying 6:5 is a worse game than a six-deck shoe paying 3:2, because the payout costs about three times what the deck count saves. Single deck is frequently used as the bait for exactly that trade.
Shoe games also changed the social texture of blackjack. Cards are dealt face up and players do not touch them, which removes a whole category of dispute and makes the game faster. Hand-held single and double deck games, where cards are dealt face down and picked up, survive mainly at higher limits and carry their own etiquette about how to hold them.
Where the numbers come from
Related terms in casino floor
- Commission — A percentage charged on winning bets that would otherwise favour the player.
- Push — A tie in which the bet neither wins nor loses and the stake is returned.
- Natural — A hand that wins immediately on the first cards dealt.
- Cut card — A coloured plastic card placed in the shoe to mark where dealing stops.
- Penetration — The proportion of a shoe dealt before the reshuffle.
- Comp — Complimentary goods or services given to players based on tracked play.
Where an entry quotes a number, that figure comes from the computed sections of this site rather than from another glossary, so the definition and the derivation cannot drift apart. Each entry links to the page where the number is worked out.