There aren’t too many card games out there today that you can play in a traditional casino and not in an online casino. If anything, the choice of card games is much wider online than it possibly can be in a land casino. That does not necessarily mean that they are all good, of course, which is precisely why we have this list of the best online casino car games for you today.
Blackjack
Blackjack is one of those classic card games that has found an immediate home in online casinos, well before the others did. The online format is perfectly suited to all popular forms of blackjack, which is why some versions of the card game are found in almost all western online casinos nowadays. In its origin, though, the game is several hundred years old.
Now, there are many versions, which makes it a complicated game to explain. However, the versions played in most land and online casinos usually follow similar rules. You will have to beat the dealer’s hand in value, without going past the total value of 21. Any player who manages to get exactly 21 wins immediately and that hand is called a blackjack. In fact, this is exactly why blackjack is also called 21 in European nations.
Andar Bahar
Andar bahar, also known as Maang Patta, is a rather simple but enjoyable Indian card game of luck and odds, played with the standard 52-card deck. It literally translates to inside (andar) outside (bahar), but actually means left (andar) and right (bahar) in the context of this card game.
The dealer cuts the deck and places the trump card (joker) face up, right in the middle of the table. The symbol (A, K, Q, J) or number (2 – 10) on the trump card is noted and the bets are placed for that round right after. Now, the objective of each bet is to successfully predict whether the first card with the matching symbol or number will turn up on the left (andar) or right (bahar) side of the trump card.
After the bets are placed, the dealer continues to place one card on the left and one on the right of the trump, until a card with the same symbol as the trump card is placed on either the left or the right. At this point, the round’s winners are noted down and a new round begins with a new trump card. You can easily get a hang of it by playing a few rounds of andar bahar on sites like this one.
Rummy
Rummy is another Indian classic card game that you will typically find in subcontinental online casinos. Classic rummy uses the standard 52-card deck and can host as many as 4 – 6 players. The dealer cuts the cards, and the round’s joker is selected in the same way as in andar bahar. The chosen joker symbol cards can substitute any missing card in a run or a book.
The primary idea is to match as many if not all the cards that you are dealt before any of your opponents do. Every card has a point attributed to it, and your secondary goal is to lay off as many points from your current hand as possible before someone manages to match all their cards. You can start laying off runs and books on the table as soon as you want, if you are ready to skip your turn at drawing from the fresh and discarded pile of cards.
A run is a sequence of at least three consecutive cards of the same suite (diamonds, clubs, hearts, or spades). For example, you can create a run of [Diamonds (5, 6 & 7)], or [Spades (10, J & Q)], as long as all cards in each run belong to the same suite. Books are pairs with 3 – 4 cards of the same value, obviously unique to each suite.
Poker is of course an extremely popular card game in international online casinos, but there are some limitations to its online adaptation, unfortunately. For example, one of the biggest pluses in poker is to be able to read the expressions, tells, and bluffs of other players. As you might think, that can be rather difficult while playing poker online.