Four Card Poker

You keep the best four of five; the dealer keeps the best four of six, one of them face up. No qualifying bar and ties go to you — the price is the dealer’s extra card. Fold, or raise one to three antes.

Five cards against six, best four play

• 5 vs 6cards
• tiesgo to you
• 25:1quads bonus

Manual

Five against six.

You get five cards and keep the best four; the dealer gets six — one face up, five face down — and keeps the best four.

One decision.

Fold and surrender the ante, or raise one to three antes. Win, and ante and raise both pay 1:1.

No qualifying bar, and ties are yours.

The dealer always plays, and an exact tie goes to the player. The price of those two gifts is the dealer’s extra card.

The Automatic Bonus.

Trips pay 2:1, a straight flush 20:1, quads 25:1 — on the ante, whatever the dealer makes. A fold forfeits it.

Four-card hands rank differently.

With one card fewer, trips are rarer than flushes and straights, so the order runs: quads, straight flush, trips, flush, straight, two pair, pair, high card.

A-K-Q-J is the top straight.

And A-2-3-4 is the bottom one — the ace plays low there and the hand counts as 4-high.

The game

An ante, then five cards to you face up — you keep the best four. The dealer gets six: one face up, five face down, and keeps the best four of them. One decision closes the hand: fold and surrender the ante, or raise one, two or three antes. Win the showdown and ante and raise both pay 1:1.

There is no qualifying bar — the dealer always plays — and an exact tie goes to the player. Those are real gifts, and they are paid for by the dealer’s sixth card: six cards make the better four often enough to price the whole game.

The Automatic Bonus pays on the ante for trips or better, whatever the dealer makes — win, lose, it does not matter. The one way to lose it is to fold.

The four-card ladder and the bonus

With one card fewer, the arithmetic of rarity changes: trips are harder to make than a four-card flush, and the flush is harder than the straight. The ladder, top to bottom, with what the bonus pays on the ante:

The numbers

Played optimally, the game gives up 2.79% of the ante per hand. Because the average hand stakes 2.14 antes, the element of risk — the loss per unit actually wagered — is only 1.30%, one of the friendlier figures on the floor.

The pre-deal readout on this table plays a simpler published recipe — fold every no-pair hand, raise 1× on pairs of twos through nines, 3× from a pair of tens up — and measures its cost live, at about 3.2% of the ante. The gap between that and 2.79% is what the finer distinctions are worth.

Remember the ladder when reading your four: trips above flushes above straights. A hand that looks modest by five-card habits can be near the top of this game’s ladder, and the top straight — A-K-Q-J — hides inside what a five-card player would call “no pair, fold”.

Tactics

Fold every no-pair hand — except the straights and flushes your best four actually makes. The dealer’s sixth card beats your high cards more often than they beat the dealer.

Small pairs — twos through nines — raise the minimum: they lose less played at 1× than folded, and not by much. Never put extra units on an underdog.

A pair of tens or better raises the maximum. You are the favourite, ties are yours, and every unit of the 3× rides at the same favourable price.

In training, the glimpse cheat turns over one of the dealer’s five hidden cards and reprices the hand conditioned on it. At a gold table the same glimpse exists only while the Sharp eyes event is running.

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