Blackjack
Eight-step basic-strategy lesson, full Train mode, plus a complete Hi-Lo card counting suite covering 17 lessons and five drills.
Stop guessing.
Start playing perfectly.
PerfectPlay is the strategy trainer that turns casino card games from guesswork into solvable puzzles. 14+ games. Real math. Every decision graded against the optimal play.
No real-money gambling
No ads
No PerfectPlay account
Local-first · optional cloud sync
14+
Games covered
21
Video poker variants
µs
Latency for advice
150+
Engine tests
The catalogue
Strategy + Counting
21 variants
Exhaustive
Bet trainer
Monte Carlo
Backward induction
Exhaustive
163K combos
Hybrid solver
~1M combos
Exhaustive
MC + lookup
Same-suit run
Wild deuces
Fourteen games. One engine.
Every game uses the same advisory engine — exhaustive search where it's tractable, Monte Carlo where it isn't. The same answers a professional player would give, returned in microseconds.
Video Poker
Jacks or Better, Bonus, Double Bonus, Triple Double Bonus, Aces & Faces, Deuces Wild, Deuces & Joker, Joker Poker, Sevens Wild, Triple Triple Bonus, Five Aces, and more — each with multiple paytables. Optimal hold mask in microseconds.
Three Card Showdown
The 18,000-combination evaluator that drops a 3.4% house edge to its theoretical minimum.
Baccarat
Player / Banker / Tie + side bets. Last-10 scoreboard helps you spot when "patterns" lie.
Pai Gow Poker
House-way splits, optimal high/low arrangements, side-bet expectations.
Hold'em Showdown
4×, 2×, 1×, fold — the sequential bet decision solved with subgame-perfect equilibrium.
5th Street Stud
Mississippi Stud's three street-by-street decisions, every paytable, every paytable-edge case.
Island Stud
Caribbean Stud's call/fold table, derived from full enumeration of every dealer hand.
Crazy Deal Poker
Crazy 4 with the swap-card decision, solved with combined exhaustive + Monte Carlo passes.
Flop Poker
Casino Hold'em's call/fold solved at the river, full 1M-combination evaluation.
Ride Poker
Let It Ride's two pull-back decisions, every hand pre-solved.
Four Card Showdown
The 270K-entry hand-rank table powering optimal raise/fold play.
High Card Flush
Longest same-suit run from seven cards, with the bet-spread decision graded against true probability.
DJ Wild Stud
Mississippi Stud variant with deuces wild — every street decision solved against the wild-rank distribution.
Behind the curtain
Real math. Real evaluators. Real speed.
- Exhaustive search where it's tractable. Three-Card: 18K combos. Mississippi Stud: full enumeration. Microseconds end-to-end.
- Monte Carlo where it isn't. Pai Gow at 100K samples. UTH with backward induction across the betting tree.
- Precomputed hand-rank tables. 22K three-card, 270K four-card, 2.6M five-card entries — built once, looked up forever.
- Validated by RTP. 110+ engine tests, including return-to-player tests that compare simulated long-run results against published theoretical values.
Two modes
Learn — bite-sized illustrated lessons walk through each game's rules, paytable, and decision tree. No prior knowledge required.
Train — random hands, every decision graded against perfect play. Misplays flagged in plain English with the correct action and the math behind it.
Stats persist per game. Accuracy %, decisions played, longest streak — all there next time you open the app.
The deep dive
+1 / 0 / −1
Full shoe
RC → TC
Half-Kelly ramp
I-18 / Fab 4
The Hi-Lo card counting suite.
A full curriculum, not a single drill. Designed to take a curious player from "what's a count?" to live-shoe-ready, with the math motivated at every step.
17-step lesson plan
01
Why counting works
Tens are good for the player. Low cards are good for the dealer. The shoe drifts.
02
Hi-Lo values
2–6 = +1. 7–9 = 0. T–A = −1. The simplest balanced count there is.
03
Low cards
Drill the +1 group on its own.
04
Neutral cards
7, 8, 9 contribute nothing — recognise instantly.
05
High cards
T, J, Q, K, A all count −1.
06
Short sequences
Walk through the running count on a 5-card stream.
07
Cancel pairs
+1 / −1 cancel. Ignore the noise; count the net.
08
Full deck = 0
The balanced-count sanity check. End-of-shoe must be zero.
09
True count
RC ÷ decks remaining. Why the divisor matters.
10
Estimating decks
Eyeballing the discard tray to within a half-deck.
11
Bet spread
The whole point of counting is to bet bigger when you're favoured.
12
Kelly sizing
Full / half / quarter Kelly explained with a $10K bankroll example.
13
Illustrious 18
The 18 deviation cells worth the most EV.
14
Insurance @ TC +3
The single biggest deviation in basic counting.
15
Fab 4 surrenders
Late-surrender cells that flip with the count.
16
Penetration
Why deep deals matter, and why 0.75 is the practical floor.
17
Ready to drill
The handoff to muscle memory.
Five drills
Card Drill
Flash one card; tap its Hi-Lo value as fast as you can. Configurable speeds from 3.0 s down to 0.18 s. Auto-advance or tap-only modes. Tracks reaction time + streak.
Running Count
Burn through a full 52-card deck. Configurable checkpoints — every card, half-deck, or end-only. The balanced count must land on zero.
True Count
Given a running count and a shoe-depth bar, dial in the true count. Shows the precise division in the review.
Bet Sizing
Pick the correct unit bet from the canonical 1u → 12u ramp. Per-tier explanation in the review so you know why.
Deviation Trainer
Hand + dealer upcard + true count — pick basic strategy or the deviation play. The TC is sampled with bias around each rule's threshold so the answer flips often.
What's in the app
Built for serious practice.
Per-game stats & Record page
Daily streak (current + best lifetime), per-game accuracy, decisions played, units-net, 30-day accuracy drift sparklines, lifetime / this-week / today timeframes. SQLite-backed.
Surrender, splits, doubles
Multi-row action buttons handle hands with 4+ choices. Splits draw to each hand independently. Cards fan to fit the table.
Plain-English feedback
"Hit. 16 vs 9 is a hit because the dealer's 9 outperforms your stand-on-16 EV by 2.1%." No magic numbers; the reasoning is shown.
Cross-platform
iOS, iPadOS, Android, Mac, Windows. Same engine, same answers, native UI on each.
Optional cloud sync
Opt-in encrypted backup of your training history across devices. iCloud on Apple platforms, Google Drive on Android. AES-256-GCM with a password you pick — the cloud provider never sees decrypted data, and there's no PerfectPlay server in between.
Offline-first
Plays fully offline. Sync is off by default and never required. Works on a plane.
Common questions
FAQ
Is this real-money gambling?
No. PerfectPlay is a strategy trainer. There is no wagering of real or virtual currency, no purchasing of chips, and no jackpots. You play simulated hands; the engine grades each decision; you build accuracy.
Will using PerfectPlay get me banned from a casino?
Using a strategy trainer at home is not gambling and has no relationship with any casino. Card counting is not illegal in most jurisdictions, but casinos are private property and may ask players to leave for any reason. We don't endorse, recommend, or facilitate live counting — PerfectPlay is for the math.
How accurate are the recommendations?
Where the game's state space is small enough — Three Card, Blackjack, Mississippi Stud, Video Poker — we exhaustively enumerate every possible deal and choose the EV-maximizing action. There is no closer-to-perfect than that. For larger games (Pai Gow, Hold'em) we use Monte Carlo with enough samples to put confidence intervals well below the granularity of any meaningful decision.
Does PerfectPlay collect data?
No. There's no analytics, no telemetry, no advertising SDK, no PerfectPlay account, and no PerfectPlay server. All stats are stored in a local SQLite database on your device. If you opt into cloud sync, an encrypted copy of your training history is mirrored to your own iCloud / Google Drive — we still don't see it, because the data is encrypted on-device before it leaves and only your devices hold the key. See our Privacy Policy.
How does cloud sync work?
Sync is off by default. When you enable it in Settings, you pick a password that's stored in your device's secure keystore (Keychain on iOS / macOS, Keystore on Android). Your training history is serialised, encrypted with AES-256-GCM using a key derived from that password (PBKDF2-SHA256, 100,000 iterations), and uploaded to your own iCloud private database (Apple) or Google Drive app-data folder (Android). The cloud provider stores opaque bytes; only your devices can decrypt. Forgetting the password means the cloud copy can't be recovered — local data is unaffected.
Why are the in-app game names different from the casino?
Several casino games have trademarked names. PerfectPlay uses descriptive non-trademarked names — "Three Card Showdown" rather than the licensed product name, for example. The rules, paytables, and strategy are mathematically equivalent.
What platforms are supported?
iOS and iPadOS via the App Store, Android via Google Play, plus desktop builds for macOS and Windows. Same engine on all platforms — the answers don't change.
How do I report a bug or request a feature?
Email support@perfect-play.app or use the support page. Include the game, the hand, and what you expected vs what you saw — we'll usually have a fix in the next release.