Three Card Poker
Match the ante or fold, with a pair bonus alongside and an ante bonus the dealer cannot take back. A straight beats a flush here — with three cards it is the rarer hand.
Three cards, one decision
- 18,424dealer hands counted
- exactodds
Manual
- Two bets.
- The ante plays against the dealer; the pair bonus is a separate wager on your own three cards and pays whatever the dealer holds.
- Match or fold.
- After seeing your three cards, put out a play bet equal to the ante or surrender the ante.
- Dealer needs queen high
- to have a game. If the dealer misses, the ante pays 1:1 and the play bet is returned.
- Ante bonus
- pays on a straight or better whether you win, lose or the dealer never qualifies — it is the one payout the dealer cannot take from you.
- Ranking.
- A straight beats a flush here. With three cards a straight is the rarer hand: 720 of them against 1,096 flushes.
The game
Three cards to you, three to the dealer, and one decision: match the ante with an equal play bet, or fold and surrender the ante. The dealer needs queen high or better to have a game at all — miss, and the ante pays 1:1 while the play bet comes back untouched.
Alongside the main bet sit two side payouts. The pair bonus is a separate wager on your own three cards that pays whatever the dealer holds. The ante bonus pays on a straight or better whether you win, lose, or the dealer never qualifies.
The probabilities
Out of 22,100 possible three-card hands:
| Straight flush | 48 · 1:460 |
| Trips | 52 · 1:425 |
| Straight | 720 · 3.26% |
| Flush | 1,096 · 4.96% |
| Pair | 3,744 · 16.9% |
| High card | 16,440 · 74.4% |
| Dealer qualifies (queen high+) | 69.59% |
Why a straight beats a flush
With three cards the usual order flips: there are 720 straights against 1,096 flushes, so the straight is the rarer hand and ranks above. Every ranking in this game follows the three-card counts, not the five-card habit.
Tactics
The whole strategy is one line: play queen-six-four or better, fold below it. That single rule is optimal — it folds about a third of hands and gives the house 3.37% of the ante on this paytable.
Never fold a straight or better: the ante bonus pays even when the dealer misses, so the hand is worth money the moment you play it.
The pair bonus at 4:1 on the flush costs 2.32%. Beware tables paying 3:1 there — that one row moves the edge to 7.28%, three times worse for the same game.
The decision ledger counts every one of the 18,424 hands the dealer can still hold, so the numbers you see in training are exact, not estimates.