You hold Ace-5 — a soft 16, meaning the ace still counts as 11. Dealer shows 7. The correct basic-strategy play:
| Hit ← | -0.0049 |
| Double | -0.1839 |
| Stand | -0.4754 |
| You bust on the next card | 0.0% |
| Dealer 7 busts | 26.2% |
Hit is not close: it beats Double by 0.1790 per unit. Getting this one wrong costs $1.79 on a $10 bet, every single time. Across the 340 situations in this chart it ranks 179th by expected value — better than 161 of them, worse than 178. Expected value is per unit staked, computed for multi-deck, dealer stands on soft 17, double after split allowed. The model and the code are published as data.
The beauty of soft 16 (Ace-5): you cannot bust — the ace simply drops to 1 if the card is big. Against a dealer 7 (only 26% bust chance), your current total isn't good enough to stand on, and doubling doesn't pay against a card this strong. Free shot at improving: take it.
Soft hands are where most casual players leak the most: they play them like hard totals and miss every profitable double. Learning the six soft-total rows of the chart is the fastest win-rate upgrade there is.