Sports TV Blackjack

Most live blackjack tables are quiet places. Polished felt, soft lighting, and a dealer with that measured casino voice they all seem to pick up somewhere along the way.

Sports TV Blackjack has the sport on instead. There are screens behind the dealer with results coming in, and a croupier who'll happily tell you what they make of the 3:40 while they're shuffling. It's one of our Sports Studio tables, sat right next to All Bets Sports Blackjack, and you won't find it anywhere else.

If you were going to have a bet and stick the racing on anyway, this saves you doing the two things separately.

The studio makes no attempt to look like Monte Carlo, and that's rather the point of it. It looks like somewhere you'd settle in to watch a match, with the sport running behind the dealer and the table front and centre.

Underneath the theme it's standard Playtech kit, which matters more than the decor does. The shoe is real, the cards are dealt on camera in front of you, and the camera moves between a wide shot of the table and a close-up of the cards as they come out.

Your betting positions sit on screen just under the video. Your chips, your seat, your hand total and the clock ticking down on the betting window all have their own place, and it works the same whether you're on a laptop at home or a phone on the bus.

One thing worth knowing before your first hand. That betting window is short, and if you've got one eye on a finish playing out behind the dealer, you will miss it. Everybody does it once. Get your chips down first, then look up.

If you've played blackjack before, you're sorted. The aim is to be the person to finish closer to 21 than the dealer without tipping over it.

Pick your chip, drop it onto your seat, and get your bet down before the window shuts. You and the dealer each get two cards. Yours land face up, and one of the dealer's stays face down until the end.

Then it's over to you:

• Hit for another card

• Stand to stick with what you've got

• Double down to double your stake for exactly one more card

• Split a matching pair into two hands

Once everyone at the table has had their turn, the dealer plays theirs and the round settles itself. Picture cards count as ten, and an ace is either one or eleven, whichever does you a favour.

If the dealer turns up an ace you'll be offered insurance. Most of the table will take it and most of them shouldn't, so have a think rather than clicking out of habit.

Seven seats, with stakes running from £5 up to £2,500.

Those seven seats go quickly when there's racing on, which is worth planning around. A weekday evening and you'll walk straight in. Saturday afternoon is a different story.

The £5 minimum is a step up from a lot of the lobby, so a session moves along faster than it does at the lower stake tables. Decide what you're happy to spend before you get comfortable.

The side bets on offer are shown before the cards come out, and the full rules sit inside the game. Worth a quick read before your first hand rather than halfway through one.

The interface keeps a history of your hands, so you can look back at how the last few rounds have treated you.

The chat is where this table earns its name. On a standard blackjack table it tends to be a quick hello and not much else, because there isn't a great deal to say. Here there's a result landing every few minutes and the dealers are more than happy to give you their opinion on it. They're real people, and when they see your screen name they'll answer you by it. The dealers change through the day too, so the room shifts a bit depending on who's on.

If you'd rather just concentrate on the cards, close the panel and crack on.

Sports TV Blackjack is a properly run Playtech table with the sport on in the room, and that's a smaller change than it sounds until you've sat at it. The game itself isn't any different. What's different is that there's something to talk about between hands, and somebody behind the table who wants to talk about it.

If you'd rather have a lower minimum and more side bets to play with, All Bets Sports Blackjack is sat right beside it in the live casino blackjack lobby and starts at £1. Plenty of people work through both.

And a last bit of advice from anyone who's played it: get your bets down before you look up at the screens. Decide what you're happy to spend before you pull up a chair, and stick to it.