For the year 2017, more than 21,000 published references can be found in PubMed when entering the search term “cardiac surgery”. This review focusses on conventional cardiac surgery, considering the new interventional techniques only if they were directly compared to classic techniques but also entails aspects of perioperative intensive care management. The publications last year provided a plethora of new and interesting information that helped to quantify classic surgical treatment effects and provided new guidelines for the management of structural heart disease, which made comparisons to interventional techniques easier. The field of coronary bypass surgery was primarily filled with confirmatory evidence for the beneficial role of coronary artery bypass grafting for complex coronary disease and equal outcomes for percutaneous coronary intervention for less complex disease including main stem lesions. For aortic valve treatment, the new guidelines provide an equal recommendation for surgical and transcatheter aortic valve replacement for high and intermediate risk giving specific check lists to individualize decision-making by the heart team. For low-risk aortic stenosis, surgical valve replacement remains the primary indication. For the mitral valve, the importance of surgical experience of the individual surgeon on short- and long-term outcome was presented and the prognostic impact of mitral repair for primary mitral regurgitation was emphasized. In addition, there were many relevant and interesting other contributions from the purely operative arena in the fields of tricuspid disease as well as terminal heart failure (i.e., transplantation and ventricular assist devices). While this article attempts to summarize the most pertinent publications, it does not have the expectation of being complete and cannot be free of individual interpretation. As in recent years, it provides a condensed summary that is intended to give the reader “solid ground” for up-to-date decision-making in cardiac surgery.