Blackjack has a split. It was the last rule missing from a game that has been
live for a week, and it is the only move in blackjack that takes chips out of
your stack *after* the cards are out — which is most of what there is to get
wrong about it.
So the state stops pretending. State.Player is gone; there is a slice of Hands,
each with its own cards, its own bet, its own outcome and its own payout, and an
Active index the player works left to right. Settle runs per hand and rakes per
hand: netting them against each other first would mean a player who won one and
lost one paid no rake at all, which is not a rake, it's a discount for
splitting. The web layer takes the second bet before the move and hands it
straight back if the engine refuses — the same shape double already used, except
double was staking st.Bet, the whole table's stake, which was the same number as
the hand's until today and is now emphatically not. DoubleCost/SplitCost are the
active hand's, and the felt would have found this by charging you 300 to double
the third hand of a split.
The rules that cost money if you guess them: split aces get one card each and no
say (a pair of aces is otherwise the best hand in the game, forever), 21 on a
split hand is twenty-one and not a natural (it does not pay 3:2 — the test that
pins this is the most expensive one in the file), same rank rather than same
value (a king and a queen are not a pair), four hands maximum, double after
split allowed, and if every hand busts the dealer does not turn over.
A live hand outlives a deploy, so State.UnmarshalJSON still reads the old blobs:
"player" with no "hands" becomes one hand holding the whole stake. Without it, a
player mid-hand at restart is a player whose cards vanished — which is not a
decode error, and would not have looked like one.
On the felt a hand is now a box with its own spot, and a split is a card lifting
out of one hand into a new one with a second stack of chips flying after it from
your pile. Verified in a browser against a real pair: chips 4738 -> 4638 on the
split, two hands played out, one push and one loss, "Down on the deal. -100",
4738 back. Three hands stack without collision at 390px. Settled hands come back
to full brightness — dimming means "not your turn", and when the deal is over
they are the thing you are reading.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_013M5nD7PgUboJXoDcYHzpuJ
The engine, the escrow and the wire were all in place; nothing had a browser on
the end of it. This is that end: a lobby, a table, and the five endpoints between
them.
The browser holds no game. It sends intents and gets back a view — the cards it
is entitled to see, and the script of how they arrived, one event per card off
the shoe. The dealer's hole card is not in the payload at all until the reveal,
because a field the client is told to ignore is a field somebody reads in
devtools. The shoe lives in game_live_hands, which also means a redeploy
mid-hand no longer costs a player their stake: the hand is still there when they
come back.
The money is ordered so nothing can be spent twice. The stake leaves the stack in
the same statement that checks it exists, before a card is dealt. Every new hand
is seated with a plain INSERT, so a double-clicked Deal is decided by the primary
key rather than by a read that raced — it loses, gets its chips back, and the
hand in progress is untouched. A double takes its raise up front and hands it
straight back if the engine refuses the move.
Cards are dealt rather than swapped in — they fly out of the shoe and turn over,
which was a requirement and not a flourish. The faces and the chips are still
plain; that's next.
