Live Blackjack Games – an overview It may appear complicated at first for new players, Blackjack is actually quite an easy game to get your head around. It’s certainly much easier for beginners thank poker for example! What players are essentially trying to do is beat the dealer’s hand with a hand valued as close to or equalling 21. Remember, you don’t actually need 21 to beat the dealer – we’ll touch on this in a bit more detail later. The game itself is fairly fast-paced with plenty of action. The pace can depend on the table you’re playing at; for example, the Speed Blackjack game variants tend to player far quicker than the other variations. Live Blackjack can be played with anything between one deck of 52 playing cards right the way up to eight decks. When it comes to games that employ multiple decks, the cards can be shuffled by hand or by a machine. Shuffled decks are housed in a transparent dealing shoe from which the dealer draws. Generally speaking, the cards are reshuffled when around half of the cards within the dealing shoe have been dealt.