Russian Poker

Buy a sixth card, swap up to five, insure against a dead dealer, buy the dealer a game, and get paid for two combinations at once.

Five cards against the house

• 32discard lines
• 2combinations
• bingotable talk

Manual

Deal.

Ante posted, five cards each, one dealer card up.

Improve.

Buy a sixth card or swap 1–5 cards, once per hand. Selecting is free; the one-ante fee is charged only on confirm and is never returned.

Two combinations.

Two hands that each hold a card the other does not use are both paid — pair + Ace-King, two pair + two pair, straight + straight, two flushes. Kickers do not count, and the second hand only pays when your best five beat the dealer.

Qualify.

Dealer needs Ace-King or better. If the dealer misses, the ante pays 1:1 and the bet is returned.

Beating a qualified dealer

pays the bet at the table odds; the ante is handed back unpaid. The ante only ever wins when the dealer has no game. Settings can switch this to ante-pays-1:1 for houses that run it that way.

No game.

When the dealer misses you may pay one ante to have the dealer's highest card replaced from the deck. Buy and the hands are compared for real, so your bet can be paid in full; decline and you take the ante at 1:1 with the bet returned.

Insure.

With trips or better, stake one ante up to the full payout your hand would win. Pays 1:1 if the dealer misses.

Bingo.

A neighbour calling bingo holds a card of the dealer's upcard rank. Each call removes one of those cards from the deck, so the dealer pairs the upcard less often and qualifies less often. A table where nobody calls is the opposite: those cards are still live and sit disproportionately in the dealer's hand.

Pays.

AK/pair 1:1 · two pair 2:1 · trips 3:1 · straight 4:1 · flush 5:1 · full house 7:1 · quads 20:1 · str.flush 50:1 · royal 100:1

The game and its decisions

Five cards to you, five to the dealer with one face up, and the richest decision tree in the room. Once per hand you may improve: buy a sixth card or swap one to five, each for a fee of one ante that is never returned. Then bet two antes or fold. The dealer needs Ace-King or better to have a game — on a miss the ante pays 1:1 and the bet comes back, or you may pay one ante to replace the dealer's highest card and play the showdown for real.

With trips or better you may insure before the dealer turns over: stake up to the full payout your hand would win, paid 1:1 if the dealer misses. And uniquely here, two combinations that each hold a card the other does not use are both paid — pair plus Ace-King, straight plus straight, two flushes off six cards.

By default beating a qualified dealer pays the bet only, with the ante handed back unpaid — the ante only ever wins when the dealer has no game.

The deal, and what the table costs

Out of 2,598,960 five-card hands:

The ante rule is half the edge

Measured over full-table deals with the ante returned unpaid on a win: betting every hand blind costs −0.297 antes per hand, and the basic line — fold below Ace-King, bet the rest — costs −0.186.

At houses where the ante pays 1:1 on a win the same figures are −0.141 and −0.028. One row of the rules roughly doubles the house edge; check it before you sit down.

Table talk

A neighbour calling bingo holds a card of the dealer's upcard rank, and every call removes one of those cards from the live deck — the dealer pairs the upcard less often and qualifies less often. Measured over 200,000 deals per row, at three neighbouring boxes:

Tactics

Never swap one card when you can buy the sixth: the buy keeps everything the swap would throw away, so it makes every hand the swap can make and more. Across 2,000,000 paired trials with the same drawn card, the single swap never once came out ahead.

Fold below Ace-King — including after an improvement that missed. The swap and buy lines in the ledger already assume that discipline; betting through with junk is how the blind −0.297 happens.

Insurance is priced by one number: the dealer's chance of missing. It pays 1:1, so it is only +EV when the miss is over 50%. A silent table qualifies about 56.5% of the time — skip it. Two bingo calls push qualification to 49.2%, and that is where insurance flips positive.

Two bingo calls or more also mean the dealer misses more — take the extra ante wins and lean on your made hands. Silence is the opposite signal: the upcard's mates are still live and disproportionately in the dealer's hand.

Swap or buy: the cases

Six real hands, priced by the simulator at 200,000 deals each, ante 10, ante returned unpaid. The figure is the expected result of the hand's best line; folding always costs exactly −10.

The rule behind the cases

Buy when you hold a draw. A four-flush or an open straight draw wants a sixth card, never a one-card swap: the buy keeps the pat five as a fallback, and if the draw comes in next to a pair, both combinations pay at once — that is how the flush-draw-with-a-pair hand turns positive at +6.8 while every swap of it stays under water.

Swap when you hold something worth keeping that a sixth card would not help: a pair or an Ace-King keeps its two or three spare cards churning. Buying under a low pair is the worst of the improving lines (−7.6 against the swap's −4.2), because the sixth card rarely makes the second combination and the fee is real.

Fold junk. Below Ace-King with nothing to draw at, even swapping four runs behind the plain −10 of folding — against a weak upcard it is a coin toss at best (−10.35 vs −10.00), against an ace it is simply worse.

All of it moves with the upcard and with any table talk you have heard, which is exactly what the ledger prices live. These cases are the map, not the territory.

The bonus bet

Staked with the ante, before the deal, and settled on the first five cards alone: the dealer's hand, your swaps, the insurance and even a fold are all irrelevant to it. The ladder starts at a straight — a pair, two pair and trips all lose — which is why its rungs climb so steeply.

It never changes how the hand should be played — the bet is decided the moment the cards land. A straight or better is one deal in 132, and at an exact 30.78% the house keeps close to a third of every chip staked: dearer than the main game played blind (−0.297 antes, about 29.7% of one ante per hand). A side bet for the jackpot, never for value.

The double pay, in numbers

The bonus this game pays is its double combination: two hands in one holding, each paid in full, when neither one's cards are a subset of the other's. Measured over 400,000 random deals:

What each combination pays

The bet is paid at the multiplier of the hand, and a second combination adds its own multiplier on top:

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