Basic strategy. Card counting. Zero mistakes.

The core is free forever: the seven-chapter basic-strategy course, unlimited Drill, the full 340-move strategy chart, the card-tag and running-count drills, progress saving, the dashboard with your error heatmap, and the daily streak. Pro (€9.99/month or €99/year) unlocks Smart SR, Speed, the Weaknesses session, the blank grid, true-count and bet-sizing drills, the Illustrious 18 deviations and the spread simulator. Cancel anytime. Strategy Rush is free to play, with one scored run banked per day on a free account and unlimited runs on Pro.

No. You can play three hands on this page right now, and both Drill mode and Strategy Rush work as a guest — a guest run is a real run, it just isn't banked on the leaderboard. Create a free account whenever you want to save progress and unlock the dashboard, the hand review and your statistics.

It is the mathematically optimal way to play every hand — hit, stand, double, split or surrender — based on your two cards and the dealer's upcard. It comes from combinatorial analysis of the game's odds, not from guesswork or feel. Played perfectly, basic strategy lowers the house edge to roughly 0.5% on a typical 6-deck, dealer-stands-on-soft-17 game, against several percent for players who improvise.

There are 340 distinct player-hand and dealer-upcard combinations. The correct move for each one is fixed — it never changes from hand to hand — which is exactly why the whole thing can be learned like a table rather than reasoned out at speed. Soft17's free chart lists all 340, and the drill turns that chart into spaced repetition so the moves become automatic. A hand typically reaches mastery in four to six review cycles.

Two modes borrowed from competitive chess. Strategy Rush is a run against the clock — 3 minutes, 5 minutes or survival — where every correct hand pushes the difficulty up a notch across five tiers, and three wrong answers end it; scores go on a leaderboard. The hand review is the other half: instead of marking a decision right or wrong, it prices what each one cost you in expected value and sorts them into five bands — best, good, inaccuracy, mistake, blunder. Standing on 16 vs 10 gives up 0.0006 of a bet and standing on 12 vs 10 gives up 0.1594, so the review shows you which mistakes are actually worth fixing first.

Counting cards using nothing but your own head is not illegal anywhere we know of — it is not fraud and it is not cheating, because you are only tracking information the casino deals face up. Casinos are private businesses, though, and they may refuse service or bar you from a table for it. Devices and outside help are a different matter and are illegal in many jurisdictions. Soft17 teaches the mathematics; where and whether you use it is your responsibility.

Hi-Lo for almost everyone: it is level one, balanced, and it is what published index plays are calculated for. KO is unbalanced, so it skips the true-count division at a small cost in accuracy. Hi-Opt II and Omega II are level two and more accurate, but they need an ace side count to size bets properly and they cost far more mental effort at the table. Soft17 trains all four — pick one in settings and the card-tag, running-count and true-count drills all follow it.

Basic strategy assumes a fresh shoe. Once you are counting you know when the deck is rich in tens, and a handful of hands change their correct play at a specific true count. Those are index plays: the Illustrious 18, plus the Fab 4 late surrenders. Insurance, normally a bad bet, becomes correct at a true count of +3. Soft17 has a dedicated deviations drill and a count coach at the live table that flags them as they come up.

Number of decks, whether the dealer hits or stands on soft 17 (H17/S17), double after split (DAS), surrender, and European No Hole Card (ENHC). The correct strategy — in the chart, the course and the grading — adapts to the rules you choose.

No. Soft17 is a training tool: no betting, no deposits and no real money anywhere in the app. You train your decisions, not your wallet. Basic strategy minimises the house edge but does not eliminate it, and blackjack stays a negative-expectation game outside specific advantage-play conditions.