Older Than the Oldest Shark – Online Blackjack at Springbok!

There is a fish gliding about under the Arctic ice right now that was already out there when the Dutch were still arguing over whether the Cape was worth a vegetable garden. It has never grown a new fin, never picked up a new feature and never updated itself in any way whatsoever, and it happens to be the longest-living animal with a backbone that science has ever managed to measure. Hold that thought for a minute or two, Bokke.

Here at Springbok Casino we keep something in our lobby that is older than that fish, for all its centuries, and you can open it in your browser without installing any software. Every rule on the felt, every payout, and the one decision we leave entirely up to you were all written down before that fish was even born. They have not been adapted, softened or modernised along the way either. What you play on our felt are the originals...

Online blackjack is therefore no invention of the internet age at all, mense. Somebody put the rules down on paper in Spain while Elizabeth I was still sitting on the English throne, and the two rules that really count are printed on our table for anybody to glance at before parting with a cent. The fish and the felt have this much in common: roughly four hundred years have gone by, and neither of them has been altered in any way since!

The Greenland Shark – Hundreds of Years Later & It's Still Watching!

Long before Springbok Casino existed there was Somniosus microcephalus – a thick grey slab of an animal with a small head. It has a blunt snout and a habit of reaching 6.4 metres, weighing over a ton. Scientists age the Greenland shark by radiocarbon dating the crystals inside its eye lens, which puts the species between 272 and 510 years. The oldest one measured came in at 392 years, give or take 120 – and still no other vertebrate on Earth comes close!

That same eye lens is where a second story starts, and researchers published it in August. Marine science had the animal down as functionally blind for decades, seeing as parasites hang off its eyeballs and the water is as black as tar. A team at the University of California, Irvine then took a proper look at one and found no cell death whatsoever in the retina. Haibo! The eyes of a four-century-old fish are in better nick than yours will be at sixty!

• No vertebrate has a longer known lifespan, at 272 to 510 years.
• The oldest individual measured came in at 392 years, give or take 120.
• Age was established by radiocarbon dating crystals inside the eye lens.
• Cell death was absent from every retina examined.
• Rhodopsin in those retinas stayed active and tuned to blue light.
• DNA repair is the mechanism researchers suspect keeps it going.

Four hundred years have gone by without a redesign. The Greenland shark has never needed a new model, a software update or a feature release, and it feeds on whatever it finds up there in the Arctic… carrion included. It found a design that works in the dark and it stuck with it, which happens to be the most efficient survival strategy anywhere in the ocean… and that kief bit of engineering is precisely what we want to talk about at an online blackjack table!

Card Sharp or Card Shark – Which One Are We Talking About?

Caravaggio painted The Cardsharps around 1594, a full decade before anybody wrote the rules of 21 down, and the scene in it is precisely what you would expect – a young mark studying his cards, a boy with a spare one tucked behind his back, and an older man reading the mark's hand over his shoulder. Georges de La Tour painted nearly the same setup in 1635. The character is that old, and the vocabulary around him is still in use at an online blackjack table.

At Springbok we use both spellings, since card sharp is the older English one and card shark the American, and in ordinary use the shark version no longer means a cheat. Is a card shark cheating you, though? He is not, in the modern sense. It describes an advantage player – an oke who wins because he understands the game better than the person across from him, with nothing skelm going on. Called a card shark at a felt these days, you have been paid a compliment.

That is where our Arctic friend earns his place in an online blackjack guide. That shark cruises at 0.74 metres a second, and every single seal it eats can swim rings around it without breaking a sweat. Marine biologists are still working out how the ambushes happen at all, and the leading explanation is that the shark takes the seals while they are asleep. Not one part of that involves speed. All of it involves knowing precisely where to be, and when.

Blackjack in a Spanish Novel & the Rules We Kept

Miguel de Cervantes wrote Rinconete y Cortadillo somewhere between 1601 and 1602, and the two protagonists of that story are card cheats working the streets of Seville. Cervantes gambled himself, which is presumably why the detail is so exact, and the game his young rogues are proficient at is veintiuno. Twenty-one, in Spanish, and they played it on the forty-card baraja deck rather than the fifty-two you would sommer pick up at the café today.

Two things in that story survived four centuries of travel through France, through Britain and eventually into a browser window in Mzansi. The object of the game is to reach 21 points without going over. The ace counts either 1 or 11, and you choose between the two for the better hand out of the cards you hold. Both of those sentences describe our online blackjack tables here at Springbok Casino, word for word, with nothing added and nothing dropped.

The English took their own sweet time catching up. The first published rules in Britain appeared in 1800 under the name vingt-un, a good two hundred years after a Spanish novelist had written the thing down. The name blackjack itself is a later American arrival, from a bonus that houses once paid for an ace dealt beside a black jack. What reached our online blackjack tables at Springbok Casino is the Seville version, rules and all.

The Blackjack Felt at Springbok – What We Print on It

Open our standard online blackjack table, the one marked simply Blackjack in the Table Games tab, and the very first thing to look at is the limits panel up in the top left-hand corner. The figures on it are 1 | 500. That is your floor and your ceiling on a single hand with us at Springbok Casino, and the figures in that panel are the figures your account is debited and credited in. We transact in ZAR, so nothing gets converted on the way through.

The chips on the rail are R2, R10, R20, R100 and R200. You can build a R2 wager, a R500 wager and every stake in between the two of them out of those five denominations. A pensioner in Kimberley playing for coffee money and a high roller in Sandton sit down at the same Springbok Casino table, on the same rules, and neither of them has to go hunting through the lobby for an online blackjack game that fits a bankroll of any size.

Then there is the online blackjack felt itself, the part most of us scroll straight past on the way to the chips. We print three lines on it in front of the shoe, in red and gold, and with those three lines we set out the entire commercial arrangement between you and us before a single card has been turned over. There is no small print anywhere, no second page and no support ticket required to see it. Here they are, exactly as they appear on the table:

• BLACKJACK PAYS 3 TO 2
• DEALER MUST HIT SOFT 17
• INSURANCE PAYS 2 TO 1

The Decisions on Your Blackjack Hand & How to Make Them

With our three lines printed, we start an online blackjack hand by dealing your two cards face up and one of ours face up beside them, and we keep our second card face down until the finish. From that partial view you have four moves available, and you play the whole game by choosing between them correctly. There is no fifth option hidden in a menu, no feature to unlock and nothing at all to buy your way into, and there has not been a fifth one since Seville.

• Hit – take another card, and keep taking them until you stand or bust.
• Stand – keep the hand you were given, and we settle it against our two cards.
• Double – double your bet, take one more card, and the hand is finished.
• Split – separate a pair of equal value into two online blackjack hands, matching your bet on the second.

Doubling is the aggressive move and we are lekker generous with our rule on it at Springbok: you can double on any two cards at all, rather than only on a total of 10 or 11 the way many houses do. Splitting comes with one exception that good players still get wrong, and it is the ace yet again. Split a pair of aces at our table and we deal one card to each of them. You cannot hit or double it afterwards, so it is one card apiece and that is the pair of them, finish and klaar.

One more rule applies to splitting at our online blackjack tables, since it shifts according to what you are playing on. On instant play in a browser, you can split twice, working a promising pair out into three separate hands. On a phone, you get one split. Everything else is the same, from the felt to the payouts, and the number of splits available is the one thing that differs between the screen on your desk and the one in your pocket.

The Ace Is Showing... Do You Take Insurance?

Whenever our up card happens to be an ace, we here at Springbok Casino offer you insurance before anything else happens on the hand. It costs half your original bet, and it is a wager that our face-down card is worth ten and we are sitting on blackjack. Take it or decline it, and then play continues just as it would have done anyway, since nothing about the insurance decision alters a single card that either of us has been given.

Here is the online blackjack sum, worked at a R100 hand so you can follow every rand of it. Insurance costs you R50. If we do hold blackjack, we return R150 to you on that R50 at 2 to 1 and we take your R100 ante, and you finish the hand dead level, having neither won nor lost a cent. If we don't hold it, the R50 is ours and your hand plays on against whatever we turn over. That is what we're offering, and now you can price it yourself instead of guessing.

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Blackjack Payouts at Springbok – In Rand… On Our Felt!

We pay a winning online blackjack hand one of three ways at our table, and the difference between them is worth real money across a long stretch of hands. We set the whole arrangement out in four lines on our Payouts screen, which is fewer lines than almost any paytable elsewhere in the lobby, and there is a reason for that brevity. This is a game with remarkably little bolted onto it at all, and it has been that way since a Spanish novelist wrote it down.

Here is the surprise on the first line at our online blackjack tables, and specifically the four words attached: 3 to 2 applies to your first hand only. We pay even money instead on a two-card 21 dealt to a hand you created by splitting, the same as any other winner. The total is the same and the two cards are the same, yet the price differs… and on a R100 bet that difference comes to fifty bucks in your own balance. That is something to weigh before you separate a pair.

At our smallest Springbok Casino chip we pay R5 back on a R2 blackjack, and at the R500 ceiling we pay R1,250 into your balance on the very same two cards. That push line is the one we never get thanked for – tie with our hand on any total from 17 upwards and we return your stake to you untouched, neither won nor lost. Across a long enough session at our tables that amounts to a serious sum of money that neither of us ever takes off the other.

Dealer Rules at Springbok Casino – How the Blackjack Moves are Governed

Our side of an online blackjack table has no choices on it whatsoever. Every move we make with our two cards was settled before the shuffle, and our rule is set out in six lines; we do not bend for a good run, a bad run or a big bet. Does any of it change when you are three big wins ahead? Not one line of it changes, ever. This is the part most of us find hardest to believe at first, and it is the very part that makes blackjack strategy possible at all.

We hit any total of 16 or less on an online blackjack hand and stand on any total of 17 or more. On hard totals, where no ace counts as 11, it is the same – we hit 16 or under and stand on 17 or over. On soft totals, where an ace counts as 11, we hit on 17 or less and stand on 18 or more. That soft 17 line is the one we print on the Springbok Casino felt in front of you, and we print it there because that one line changes the correct move on many of your own decisions.

It also means the odds behind your online blackjack decision can be worked out in advance, which is the entire basis of every strategy chart ever printed for the game. Those charts are built by running the same hand against the same fixed rule millions of times over and counting the result of each choice in the end. Change one line of our rule and every chart changes along with it, which is why reading the felt comes before playing the hand.

Three Titles with Similar Rules… Plus a Little Something Back

We have three online blackjack titles in the Springbok Casino Table Games tab – Blackjack, Suit 'Em Up Blackjack and Blackjack + Perfect Pair – and the good news for anybody who has read this far is that you already know all three of them. Every one of them is set at 1 | 500 and the chip rail is the same. The four moves, the doubling rule, the split-ace exception and the whole payout structure are the same across the lot of them.

What we add on the other two is a second circle on the felt beside your main bet, and with it a second way for us to pay you on cards you were being given anyway. That is the little something back at our online blackjack tables, and it is optional every single hand. You still play your main hand under precisely the rules you have just read through, and we settle the side wager on your first two cards before any hitting, standing or doubling happens at all.

The two paytables differ, and we print each one beside the circle it belongs to. On Suit 'Em Up we pay from 60 to 1 on two suited aces down to 2 to 1 on any other suited pair, with suited blackjack at 10 to 1 in between. On Perfect Pairs we pay 25 to 1 on a perfect pair, 12 to 1 on a coloured pair and 6 to 1 on a mixed one. Neither of those side wagers alters your main online blackjack hand, whichever way it turns out.

Before You Bet – Your Online Blackjack Questions Covered!

Right then, Bokke, that is the mathematics, the history and a very old fish all covered off between us, and you would be forgiven for having a thing or two still rattling around in your kop. You tend to come away from a guide like this one with a handful of online blackjack questions, and these are the ones we would want answered ourselves before putting a chip down on a table we had not played. Our support team is on hand if we have missed yours.

Q: What is the smallest bet at a Springbok blackjack table?

A: Our online blackjack tables are set at 1 | 500, so the floor is R1 and the ceiling is R500 on a single hand. The smallest chip on the rail is the R2 one, and the full rail is R2, R10, R20, R100 and R200, so you can build any stake between those two ends of the scale, one chip at a time. Every one of those figures is stated in rand, because we transact in ZAR here at Springbok Casino.

Q: Does our dealer hit or stand on soft 17?

A: We hit soft 17 and we stand on soft 18 or more, and we print that line on the Springbok Casino felt in front of the shoe where you read it before betting. On hard totals we hit anything up to 16 and stand on 17 or above. A soft total means a hand where an ace counts as 11 rather than as 1. Nothing in that rule changes from one round to the next, whatever you have bet in the circle.

Q: What do we pay on a blackjack at Springbok Casino?

A: We pay 3 to 2 on a blackjack in your first online blackjack hand, so we return R250 in total on a R100 bet and R1,250 on a R500 bet. We pay even money on any other winning hand, and on a tie with our hand we return your stake untouched as a push. If we happen to hold blackjack and you took insurance beforehand, we pay you 2 to 1 on that half-stake side wager, which leaves you level on the hand.

Q: Do we pay 3 to 2 on a blackjack dealt to a split hand?

A: No, and this is the line to read carefully on our online blackjack Payouts screen. We pay 3 to 2 on the first hand only, so we pay even money instead of the premium on a two-card 21 dealt to a hand you created yourself by splitting. On a R100 bet that difference comes to R50 exactly, so keep that firmly in mind before you go separating a promising pair of tens or a pair of aces at our table.

Q: Can I double down on any two cards?

A: Yes, on any two cards you like. Our Springbok Casino rule is double on any two cards at all, which is more generous than houses restricting the move to a total of 10 or 11. You take exactly one more card after doubling, and that is the hand you finish with. You can only double once on any given hand, and we deal one card to each of a pair of split aces, which you can then neither hit nor double.

Q: Can I play blackjack on my phone at Springbok Casino?

A: You can, and you open our online blackjack tables in an ordinary browser window on any handset. One rule shifts on the smaller screen, since we permit two splits on a hand in instant play and one on mobile. Every other rule, limit and payout figure is identical on both of them, right down to the R2 chip on the rail and the 3 to 2 that we pay you on any blackjack in your first hand.

Open Our Springbok Online Blackjack Table & Chuck a Chip on the Table!

There it is, ouens. The Greenland shark that has been getting on with things since before the Cape had any outsiders settles on it, and an online blackjack game that was already old by the time that shark was born. Both of them ended up with a design that worked properly, and no one has since found a reason to change it. One of the two you can go and open for yourself – the Table Games tab in our lobby, the tile marked Blackjack, and R1 to R500 a hand.

Go on then, Bokke. Gooi a chip in your budget into the circle and watch us turn our up card over beside your two. Then, make the one decision at the table that genuinely belongs to a human being rather than to a printed rule! We print what we pay on a blackjack on the Springbok Casino felt before you have put down a cent of your own money, and after four hundred years on this earth the whole business still comes down to hitting or standing… so make it count, hoor julle?

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