What is Speed Blackjack?

Speed Blackjack is a live blackjack format in which the decision order is reversed: instead of the dealer working round the table seat by seat, the player who acts fastest is served first. Everyone is dealt at once, and the dealer takes each decision the moment it arrives. The effect is a much shorter round. A conventional live blackjack table waits on the slowest player at every turn; here it waits on nobody, and hands per hour rise sharply. Decision timers are short and a timeout is treated as a stand, so a hesitation costs the hand rather than the table's patience. What it does not change is the maths. The rules, the payouts and the house edge are those of the underlying blackjack game, so faster play does not improve or worsen the price of a hand. It does multiply exposure: at twice the hands per hour, the same edge takes twice as much from the same bankroll in the same session. That trade — identical odds, doubled throughput — is the whole of the format, and the reason a session limit matters more here than at a standard table.