Whilst looking through youtube (see my previous posts – here and here – for why I am doing this), I came across a very nice resource that showed how to implement Blackjack in Java. I am sure the video’s presenter will be the first to admit that the project is far from complete (for example, there is no double down, no splitting etc.). But that is not the point of the exercise. It was to show how to develop a complete application rather than developing a complete Blackjack player in Java.

The video was very useful. It started from an empty project and added classes as they were needed (Card, Deck, Player) and showed how they all linked together.

To be honest, it did not teach me anything I did not know already about the language syntax (as it is very close to C++) but it was very good to see somebody build a complete application from scratch.

Blackjack in Java

If you want to watch the video, take a look at the video below.

Previous interest in blackjack

I must admit to being a little biased towards this video, as I have published an academic paper on blackjack, which evolved a blackjack player so that it could play blackjack and win money. Of course, we could never use this in a casino (for many reasons!) but it was a fun project and it would be interesting to ressurect the project in Java – but that really is for another day. But I might go and see if I can find some open source classes for a deck of cards, then I could do my version of Blackjack in Java!

The football prediction project

You can read more about this project by looking at the posts for this football prediction project.