Five seats · one card each · higher card wins
The simplest game in the building, played in a room rather than alone. You take one of five seats, the betting window opens for everyone at once, and one dealer turns a single card to each seat and one to themselves. Higher card wins. Ace is high and suits never matter.
Going to war on every tie returns 97.12%, and surrendering every tie returns 96.30%. Those are exact figures for six decks rather than estimates: two cards tie 23 times in 311, and the war round was worked out over every pair of ranks with the two tied cards removed. War is one of the few games where the worse play is the one that looks safer, which is why both numbers are published rather than only the flattering one.
Running your decision clock out surrenders the hand. That is deliberate, and it is the only thing the clock is allowed to do: going to war doubles a stake, and no timer should be able to do that to somebody who has walked away from the screen. Your seat is never put into a war it did not ask for.
The shoe is committed before a card leaves it. Its hash is on the table while it is in play and the seed is published the moment the shoe is retired, so any hand it dealt can be re-derived afterwards. The dealer's war card is a single card shared by every seat still in the fight, dealt from the same shoe as everything else.
Go to war. It returns 97.12% against 96.30% for surrendering, so taking half back on every tie costs you more than fighting it out - even though the war asks for more money up front. Surrender is there because some players want it, not because it is the better bet.
The seat wins it. A tie in the war is paid exactly like a win: your original bet pushes and the war bet pays 1:1. That is the whole reason a war is worth taking - the second round is not an even fight, it is tilted your way.
The hand surrenders and half your bet comes back. The clock can never stake more of your gold than you have already put up, so a dropped connection cannot land you in a war.
No. Every seat plays its own card against the dealer's, so what somebody else draws never changes what you are paid. Sharing the table means sharing the shoe, the clock and the dealer, not the outcome.
Every round is generated from a server seed that is hashed and shown to you before you bet, combined with a client seed you control and an incrementing nonce. When you rotate your seed the old server seed is revealed, so you can replay every round it produced and confirm nothing changed after the fact.
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