Java switch cases: with or without braces?

Question

Consider the following two snippets, with braces:

switch (var) {
  case FOO: {
    x = x + 1;
    break;
  }

  case BAR: {
    y = y + 1;
    break;
  }
}
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Answer 1

is there any sort of performance penalty for using the braces with a case?

None.

The curly braces are there to help the compiler figure out the scope of a variable, condition, function declaration, etc. It doesn't affect the runtime performance once the code is compiled into an executable.