I can never get enough of the side bets in BlackjackRat.com. It’s much like the progressive option in Caribbean Stud Poker, but also wildly different. In fact, you don’t need the side bets to make playing the game worth your while if you know what you’re doing. You definitely can’t say that about Caribbean Stud.

Anyway, continuing down the line, here’s a look at three more side bets you have available to you as a player depending on what casino offers them in your area. The first one is commonly referred to as over/under. Leave it to gamblers to find a way to combine one form of gambling into a completely different game altogether. Hey, where there’s money to be won and lost, there’s a way. Similar to the over/under bet available on any major sports contest, this side bet pays off if you can accurately predict if the sum of your first two cards will be over or under 13. Under this wager, Aces count as 1, but that assignment of value won’t affect how you use it as part of your regular blackjack hand. The house carries a significantly larger advantage on an “under” bet than it does on an “over” bet, regardless of whether it’s a 1, 2, 4, 6 or 8-deck game. It’s somewhere around 11% advantage on the under and 6.6% advantage on the over. The player’s payoff for predicting accurately either way is even money return. This is probably the safest side bet available in blackjack as far as risk-return goes, a good starting point for players just starting out and exploring this aspect to the game.

Another blackjack side bet is called Pair Square, and it’s widely-available but can be easily found in Reno, Nevada. This simple side bet pays off if your first two cards are a pair, usually a benefit reserved solely for poker players. Suited pairs (when playing more than one deck, of course) pay more than non-suited pairs. Depending on the number of decks, the un-suited pairs tend to pay between 10:1 and 15:1. A matched pair on a single-deck hand typically pays 25:1 but drops more than half to 12:1 for an eight-deck hand, obviously because there are more opportunities for this to occur. The house edge is lowest here (3.9%) on a six-deck blackjack game, so try to find one of those that offers pair square if you want to play it. Avoid eight-deck games as the house edge can balloon to almost 15%. Getting suited pairs is obviously a nice benefit, but even pulling unmatched pairs is much harder than the 10:1 return odds would suggest.