Universal Access Inc. BlackJack Server
Web Blackjack is here! You can play
blackjack on the web. Not for real money [yet... But just wait
until we get Digicash running].
The rules are
- Dealer stands on soft 17.
- Split on any pair.
- Double on first two cards.
- You are not allowed to double when you get blackjack.
- If the dealer and the player have blackjack, it's a push.
- Blackjack beats drawing to 21.
- There are 6 decks in use, but the system shuffles them before
each card is dealt. (See below)
In keeping with the spirit of HTTP protocol, the server is entirely
stateless. All player state is encoded in the documents. Take a look
at the HTML source of a page, and you will see what I mean. Also, if
you reload a page, you will notice that the page you get back probably
has different cards in it. This makes it very easy for you to
cheat. Of course, it is trivial for me to encrypt the player state
vectors. If you want to write a
program that cheats at blackjack, go for it.
Actually, if you
want to write a program which does card counting, it won't work for
this model, because I don't encode the state of the deck in the
player's state vector. I could do this, by either adding the deck
state to the user state vectors, or keeping state in the server. It
might be fun to have people try their counting programs against the
server.
Preload Playing Card Bitmaps will send a
page with all 52 cards, so that subsequent play will proceed faster
(unless your web browser doesn't cache inline images). This operation
has to send you 52 GIFs, so it may take a few minutes. Also, if your
browser's image cache doesn't have at least 52 slots, then it won't do
much good.
Also, if anyone knows of some other public domain bitmap images of playing
cards please send email to me at hqm@datawave.net.
Return to the Universal Access home page.
Henry Minsky
Universal Access Inc.
hqm@ua.com