When you hear about side bets being layered onto blackjack, it’s usually a good idea to keep your chips in your stack, and save your wagers for the main game.

Rarely, there’s one that’s different and worth investigating. Joe Awada, with his new company GEC LLC, brought such a wrinkle to the Global Gaming Expo in early October at the Sands Expo and Convention Center in Las Vegas. It’s called Free Draw, and it plays more as a new basic strategy option --- a double down alternative, in a way --- than as a side bet.

"I didn’t touch regular blackjack," Awada said when I caught up with him at G2E, at the booth he shared with electronic table games manufacturer Digideal. "All I did was create more action. I always felt that the game needed to be revised, and I always thought there was a way to do it without crashing the game."

Free Draw already was is in place in Las Vegas at the Tropicana and New York-New York, at the time of the expo, with Sunset Station next in line. You don’t make the side bet until after you’ve seen your first two cards and the dealer’s up card. At that point, you can make an extra bet equal to your original wager that the dealer will bust.

If you have a soft 17 or less --- not hard 17, just a soft 17 or any 16 and under --- and you make the side bet, you get a free draw, one card that you can keep if it improves your hand, but discard if it doesn’t. If you have hard 17 or higher, you can still bet the dealer will bust, but you don’t get the free card.

Awada, a former World Series of Poker seven-card stud champion, says that properly used, the option cuts 0.03 percent off the house edge in a six-deck game. I’ve not yet seen the mathematical workup on the option and can’t detail basic strategy just yet, but certainly not everyone will use the bet to its best advantage.

For one thing, if you have hard 17 or higher and don’t get the free draw, you should never make this bet. Without getting the free card, it’s a simple bet that the dealer will bust, with an even-money payoff. Regardless of dealer up card, that gives the house the kind of double-digit edges it’s accustomed to getting on side bets. The house will make its profit off the unwary.

There’s an extra layer to think about. If you have 11 and the dealer has 6, you could double down as usual. Or instead of doubling, you could take the free draw and have two shots at improving your hand. If you take the free draw and get a 5 for a 16, you can discard the 5 and get another chance.

A company called TechArt also displayed a wager based on making hay when the dealer busts, but this one didn’t have the player-friendly free draw wrinkle. Bet the Bust is just a wager that the dealer will bust, also made after you’ve seen the dealer’s up card.

No doubt, you see the problem here. A dealer with a 6 face up busts only about 42 percent of the time, and makes 17 or better nearly 58 percent of the time. That leads to a house edge of nearly 16 percent if you Bet the Bust only when the dealer shows a 6. Literature distributed by TechArt at the show said the overall house edge is 9.63, which puts it on my "skip this bet" list.

One new game that isn’t blackjack per se but has blackjack elements is 7-14-21, and was installed at the Hard Rock Las Vegas just before G2E. It was designed and is being distributed by Leading Edge Design, the Illinois firm that designed Gems Wild Tiles cascading reels slot game and Multi-Strike Poker, both licensed and distributed by International Game Technology.

It’s an easy game to deal and to play. You make three bets before being dealt six cards, which you must sort into three two-card hands. The object is to get one hand as close to 7 as possible without going over, one hand close to 14 and one hand close to 21. As in blackjack, faces count as 10 and Aces can be 1 or 11.

You win on any hand that’s closer to the targeted total than the dealer’s hand. Ties push. The house gets an edge because on any hand in which both you and the dealer bust, the house wins. A loss on one hand doesn’t affect the others, though. If you bust on 7 and 14, you still could win the 21 hand. In addition, the player gets a 4-1 payoff on a "perfect hand" in which the three totals are exactly 7, 14, 21.

Dealers must play according to a house way, which requires they make their best 21 hand first, then their best 14 hand, with the remaining two cards as the 7 hand. The game card distributed by Leading Edge says first priority for players should be to bust no hands. After that, second priority would be to set the best 7 hand first, and then the best 14 hand. That would leave a house edge of 7.78 percent.

On his wizardofodds.com site, Michael Shackleford details a power rating system that he says takes the house edge all the way down to 0.59 percent. He also says optimal strategy can narrow it further, to 0.54 percent, but that strategy has not yet been put into words.

The 7-14-21 game comes with an optional bonus bet, with payoffs that start on even money if you win two of three hands, then increases to 7-1 for winning all three, 16-1 for a perfect hand of 7, 14, and 21, 50-1 if all cards are the same suit, 100-1 for a perfect hand with all red or all black cards, or a 2,000-1 bonanza for a perfect hand with all six cards in the same suit. The house edge is variable, because your sorting decisions could be affected by whether you make the side bet, but we’re basically looking at something between 2.5 and 3 percent. Sticking to the base game with Shackleford’s power ratings is the better play.