Sucker Bet Analysis in Mafia Blackjack

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There are a total of 5 different things you can do with your Chips to put the odds in your favor. Zynga calls them Cheats and Bets but from here on out we will refer to them as Sucker Bets. Most should just read this with a novelty of interest because wasting valuable Chips on any of these is what suckers do. The thing to keep in mind when pondering the use of these sucker bets is the fact that a brand new hand costs 10 Chips. If you are dealt crap you will probably end up with more crap and still lose the hand. Zynga kind of broke them down differently but we will go one by one here and outline how to use them and their outcomes.


The first is the option to undo your last card in the event of a bust (going over 21). You can do this 3 times per hand and the cost goes up incrementally. From the warning popup simply click the ‘Undo: X’ button and your last card will disappear and you get to experience the whole thing over again. The fact that they offer it up to 3 times per hand should be a red flag. If I’m going to risk 60% of the Chips required for a brand new hand then I best better be guaranteed a win. In the example below, I ended up with the same outcome and still lost the hand. In a real game of Blackjack I would have been able to split those 8’s and it made me mad that I couldn’t and was stuck with a 16.

What would have cost 10 Chips turned into 34 and the outcome was the same. I lost all the Chips and the bosses health remained unaffected.

The next cheat is called the ‘Reveal’. If you spend 2 Chips you can see the dealers hole card. In theory this would be good to use when you are deciding whether or not to take a hit. The Blackjack strategy is based on an assumption that the dealers hole card is always a 10 but it you want to see it you can so normally I would automatically hit a 13. In the example below I used the Reveal and saw that the dealer had a 6 so therefore I didn’t take a hit. It’s always best to let the dealer bust before you do. This is however Mafia Blackjack and seeing the hole card caused me to play differently than I would have and the end result was a lose because the dealer managed to turn a 16 into a 21. I may have won the hand if I took a hit so the Reveal basically caused me to lose and I lost more Chips than I would have.

The Pick One could be helpful but you still aren’t guaranteed anything good to pick from. In the example below a 6 really would have been ideal but my choices were 2 8’s and a 4. I would have picked the 4 but I decided to use the ‘Discard All’ button thinking I would get 3 more choices but the popup simply vanished (what a rip off!)! Zynga should provide a confirmation popup asking if you are sure you want to discard them all as you won’t get new ones. I was left with no choice but to take a hit and thankfully I got a 4 anyway (further confirming this was a waste of Chips). And of course the dealer got a 20 which beat my 19 and I ended up spending 22 Chips instead of 10.


Next up is a Score 19 which could be helpful but it’s a costly little thing. If you were to use this, I would never do so if the dealer is showing an Ace or a Ten. You also wouldn’t want to use this if it looks like you would win the hand anyway but the odds of you losing are pretty good so you will spend 40 Chips instead of 10 and even if you win the bosses health will only be reduced by 100. For 30 Chips, you could play 3 more hands and potentially reduce the bosses health by 400. Spending those extra 30 Chips doesn’t mean you will win anyway. In the example below it looked like a good time to use the Score 19 because the probability of the dealer getting a 20 or 21 was low but once again this is Mafia Blackjack. This one made me mad!

Finally there is an option to raise your bet. This was explained in the walkthrough but I’ll add it to this post as well. Once you make it to the 3rd boss you have this option and you get to see your 1st card and the bosses 1st card before you decide. If used at the right times this could make a difference but the risk is not worth the reward. You can raise the bet to a maximum of 50 Chips but the damage dealt will only be 3 times. If you lose it could be a disaster. No matter how good things look, they don’t always come out with the anticipated results. You could lose 50 Chips and get nothing for it. If you win you only do 300 damage to the bosses health and if you lose kiss those 50 Chips goodbye and the bosses health remains unaffected. The only good thing is if you get a rare Blackjack 75 Chips will be returned to you but you risked 50 Chips to earn 25. In the event of a bust this may be the only time that a undo could save the day (or in my case, maybe not!).




Finally the biggest sucker buy of all would be to replay this event 9 more times. There are only enough free Chips to master the bosses 1 and 2 and perhaps 3 so in addition to spending 50 reward points to reset the feature, you will also need to buy more Chips. I really wanted to finish this event on my mini so I could make a post about this but it doesn’t look like I will do it anytime soon. My mini has plenty of reward points but I don’t have the time to sit an play this for hours (which is what it will take). To get to this point so far, I’ve used 1,100 reward points to buy Chips and I’m not even close. Even the big spenders don’t have the kind of time it takes to do this and I can’t imagine any one of them sitting there to master this event more than one time let alone 10! At least they took an image of the replay option for the FAQ and I imagine this is the only one we will see.

When pondering over the decision to use sucker bets, keep in mind what you are playing for [1]. The value isn’t even worth the 50 reward points it cost to replay and you will have to use purchased Chips.