Probability a blackjack dealer will bust if you know their score and know the exact deck?

If you know the exact cards left in a deck, and the score of the dealer, how can you calculate the exact probability that they will bust? The dealer behaves as follows:

If the dealer's score is less than 16, the dealer will "hit" and take another card.

If the dealer has over 17 (even a "soft" score of 17 or greater with an ace and another 6 points from the other cards) the dealer will stay.

And just for clarification, in the game of blackjack an Ace can count either as 11 points or 1 point, so if the score with 11 points is still under 21, it is called a "soft" hand, meaning if the next card would put you over 21, the ace can be counted as 1 point instead.

I am able to calculate the probability of busting on the first hit as follows:

$$P(\text{busts on hit } | \text{ current score, deck}) = {(\text{# cards in deck where card + score} \gt 21) \over \text{total cards in deck}}$$

The issue I am running into is the recursive part, where the dealer must continue to hit if their score is less than 16. For instance, if the dealer has a score of 13 to start, they could hit and receive an ace, a 2 or a 3 and they would have to hit again. So the total probability of busting on the first or second hit would be something like:

$$P(\text{busts on first or second hit } | \text { current score, deck}) \\= P(\text{busting on first hit}) + P(\text{less than 16 on first hit and busting on second}) \\ = {(\text{# cards in deck where card + score} \gt 21) \over \text{total cards in deck}} \\ + \sum\limits_x P(\text{getting score of x on hit}) \times P(\text{busting on next hit with score of x})$$

The problem seems to get even hairier when you consider that the dealer might receive several cards and still have less than 16, albeit with a low probability for most deck compositions.

Is there an elegant (or at least less awful) way to express/calculate this recursive term in this problem?

• When you say you know "the exact cards left in a deck," do you mean that you only know how many of each face value is left, or that you know the sequence of face values that someone drawing from the top of the deck will see? I'm guessing you mean the former, because in the latter case, this isn't really a probability problem... Jul 5, 2015 at 19:15
• I know the contents of the deck (and therefore the probability of drawing any given value) but not the order of the deck. Jul 5, 2015 at 19:17
• You can calculate the probability of busting from $16$ with the known cards left. You can calculated the probability either of busting from $15$ with the known cards left or of drawing an Ace with the known cards left and then busting from $16$ with the adjusted known cards left. And so on. The calculations will be not be pretty, but easy enough with a computer. Jul 5, 2015 at 19:17
• The dealer outcome is 17,18,19,20,21,BJ or BUST. Start at dealer score=16. The dealer will certainly get one and only one card. Then work your way backwards calculating the outcome probabilities for dealer score=15,14,13 etc. I recommend mathematica, its so easy for this kind of thing because it takes care of the recusrive step aytomatically.You need to number all the states of the game and come up with a transition matrix that tells you where you go if you start at some state and hit a particular card. Then everything hinges on the transition matrix. Jun 1, 2019 at 11:26
• I also recommend you try the infinite deck case first, ie The cards probability is 4/13 for tens and face cards and 1/13 for the other cards, no matter what cards are dealt from the shoe. Simpler phase space. Jun 1, 2019 at 12:02

I don't know if this counts as an elegant solution in your book, but I think it's cute.

Let's say the "frequency state" of a deck is the number of cards of each face value remaining. A full deck, for example, has the frequency state "4 aces, 4 twos, 4 threes...," while an empty deck has the frequency state "0 aces, 0 twos, 0 threes...." There are $5^{13}$ possible frequency states. When you draw a card from a deck, the frequency state changes in a way that depends only on the face value of the card you drew.

You can turn the set of possible frequency states into a directed graph by drawing an arrow for each way the frequency state can change when you draw a card. I'll call this graph the "draw graph." Each vertex in the draw graph has at most 13 edges leaving it, one for each type of card you could draw.

You can turn the draw graph into a weighted directed graph by assuming that cards are drawn uniformly at random, and weighting each arrow by the probability of that kind of draw. The full-deck state, for example, has 13 arrows leaving it, each with weight $\tfrac{1}{13}$. If you draw a queen, you end up in a state that still has 13 arrows leaving it, but 12 of them have weight $\tfrac{4}{51}$, and one—the arrow for drawing another queen—has weight $\tfrac{3}{51}$. The weights of the arrows leaving each state add up to one, so the draw graph is a Markov chain.

Let's say the draw has been passed to the dealer. We know the dealer's hand and the frequency state of the deck. Here's a cool fact: from now on, we can figure out the dealer's hand just by looking at the frequency state of the deck. That's because, when the dealer starts hitting, all the cards she draws from the deck end up in her hand. Using this fact, we can translate properties of the dealer's hand, like whether it's bust, into properties of the frequency state.

Let's record this information on the draw graph by labeling its vetrtices. We'll label the states where the dealer stays as "stay states," the states where the dealer is bust as "bust states," and the states where the dealer keeps hitting as "hit states." When the dealer is hitting, she's walking randomly along the draw graph, with her direction from each state chosen using the arrow weights as probabilities. She keeps walking until she reaches a stay state or a bust state.

The dealer has to eventually stay or go bust, so the process we just described is an absorbing Markov chain. Like most things in graph theory, absorbing Markov chains have a very pretty linear algebraic description in terms of the adjacency map of the transition graph. If you know how this works, I can describe very quickly how to calculate the bust probability.

Cribbing from Wikipedia, let $Q$ be the map describing transitions from hit states to hit states, and let $R$ be the map describing transitions from hit states to stay and bust states. Let $\pi$ be the vector corresponding to the initial state, and let $\Pi$ be the projection map onto the subspace spanned by the bust states. The bust probability is the sum of the entries of the vector $$\Pi R (1 - Q)^{-1}\pi.$$ The $(1 - Q)^{-1}$ factor describes the part of the process where the dealer hits over and over, so I think it encapsulates the tricky "recursive bit" of the computation.

(Caution: my operators are the transposes of Wikipedia's, which is why the formula looks backwards.)

I think this question is related to a broader question that I ask myself all the time in research: what does it mean to have a "nice solution" to a problem? When I was young, I was taught that a "nice solution" is a formula for the thing you want to calculate, but that's not always true! Having a forumla for something often tells you very little about it, and other descriptions are often much more useful from a practical point of view.

I'm not sure whether the description of the bust probability given above is much use, but for this problem, I suspect that a linear algebraic description of this kind will be more useful than a formula.

• I like this solution a lot, and learning how to implement it will give me some much needed practice with Markov chains / linear algebra. Thanks for your time! Jul 5, 2015 at 20:39
• I am attempting to implement this in python here: github.com/elsherbini/iPython-Notebooks/blob/master/… Jul 5, 2015 at 21:24
• You know, if your goal is to calculate by computer, I think your recursive solution is much better than my linear algebraic one, because recursive functions are basically programs already. In fact, the code you have already is nearly all you need! All you have left to do is add a member to your Deck class that keeps track of the dealer's hand, and a method that creates the new Deck you get when the dealer draws a certain card. Then you can get the bust probability for a given Deck by computing the bust probabilities for all the possible draws, weighted by the probability of each draw. Jul 6, 2015 at 0:03
• This is maybe a good illustration of the idea that an "elegant solution" can mean different things in different contexts. The recursive solution doesn't look very nice, but it makes computations a snap. The linear algebraic solution might be more convenient for proving certain things, but computing with it could be a huge pain. Jul 6, 2015 at 0:07
• I agree that the recursive solution is easier for me to implement. I may do that first, and if I ever get the itch I'll try to implement the linear algebra solution. Thanks again! Jul 6, 2015 at 3:18

I've done it here! I have solved the game of blackjack in Mathematica. The results there are for infinite deck but I have the flexibility of selecting any card probability. If you want to get more into this I can tell you how to do it. Let me give you a hint: Start with the dealer outcome probabilities. Start at the simplest case: What is the probability of the dealer outcome being {17,18,19,20,21,blackjack,bust} given he hits on hard or soft 16? He will obviously take one card only so we have outcome probability = {1/13, 1/13, 1/13, 1/13, 1/13, 0, 8/13}. After you do that calculate for 15, 14 etc working your way backwards until you reach the desired one-card states which is the dealer's up card. After solving for the dealer probabilities you are ready to calculate expectations and make decisions as to which is the best strategy in each case by comparing the expectations of the options.