Caribbean Stud Poker
Caribbean Stud deals five cards to you and five to the dealer, turns one dealer card face up, and asks a single question: raise two antes or fold one. The dealer needs ace-king or better to qualify; short of that the ante is paid and the raise returned, and when the dealer does qualify the raise is paid from a schedule that climbs from a single unit on a pair to its top line on a royal flush. Oasis Poker is the same game with a paid card swap before the decision.
Every figure on this page comes from the whole deal: each of the 2598960 player hands against every dealer hand that can be made from the other forty-seven cards, with the result sorted by which dealer card is showing. That is what lets the page say not only what the game costs but what the ace-king decision, the one hard part of the game, is worth. For the order of a hand, see the how-to-play guide; the three-card game has its own Three Card Poker page.
Five-Card Hands and How Often They Are Dealt
Half of all hands are no pair at all, and the schedule's big lines, from a full house upward, together arrive on well under one deal in two hundred. The dealer's five cards follow the same table, which is why a qualifying hand, ace-king or better, turns up on 56.32% of deals and the ante is paid without a contest on the rest.
The Standard Raise Table, Four Ways of Playing It
The standard table pays a winning raise 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 20, 50 and 100 to 1 from a pair up to a royal flush, with the dealer qualifying on ace-king. The first column of figures counts the ante only, as a house edge usually does; the second counts everything on the table, since a raise adds two more antes. Best play means the raise or fold that costs least for that exact hand against that exact up-card.
The Ace-King Decision
Any pair or better is a raise and anything below ace-king is a fold; between them sit the ace-king hands, roughly one deal in sixteen, and they are the whole of the game's skill. Played perfectly they are raised on 36.41% of occasions and folded on the rest, and which is which depends on the dealer's up-card and the other three cards as much as on the ace and the king.
The rule: If the ace-king hands cannot be told apart, fold all of them: that costs 5.47% per ante, against 5.68% for raising all of them and 5.22% for sorting them perfectly.
The shape of the sort follows from the arithmetic rather than from any rule of thumb. A raise on ace-king wins mostly when the dealer fails to qualify, and the dealer fails more often when the up-card is a rank you also hold, because one of the cards that would have paired it is in your hand. So an ace-king raise is strongest when the dealer shows a card that matches one of yours, and weakest when the dealer shows an ace or a king you have no company for.
Caribbean Stud Tables to Play Free
Five Raise Tables Priced Under Best Play
A pair always pays even money. The lines that matter are the ones a session actually reaches: lifting the full house and the flush by two units each is worth close to a point, while multiplying the royal flush payout by five is worth a seventh of one. The last row shows the opposite move, two pair cut to even money, and it costs more than every improvement in the table combined.
How a Hand Ends Under Best Play
Ties, with both bets returned, are rarer than one hand in sixty thousand and are left off. Nearly half of all hands are folded, and of the hands that are played the dealer fails to qualify more often than either side wins outright, which is where most of the ante's return comes from and why a strong hand so often earns only even money.
Oasis Poker and the Progressive
Oasis Poker adds one option before the raise-or-fold decision: for the price of an ante per card, replace one or more of your five. The dealer's rule and the raise schedule are unchanged, so every figure above still describes the hand once the decision is reached; what the swap adds is a second decision whose value depends on the price charged and the hand held, and no figure is given for it here.
The key number: On the standard table the best play keeps the ante at 5.22%, which becomes 2.56% of every unit actually wagered once the raises are counted in.
The progressive side bet, where a table has one, is settled on your five cards alone from a jackpot meter, and is worth exactly what the meter says at that moment. It stands apart from the raise and never influences it.
Caribbean Stud FAQs
5.22% of the ante on the standard raise table with the best play on every hand. Measured against all money wagered, including the raises, it is 2.56%.
On 56.32% of hands, about one in 1.78. On the other hands the raise comes back and the ante settles at one to one, whatever you hold.
Sometimes: the best play raises 36.41% of ace-king hands, mostly those where the dealer's up-card matches one of your cards. A player who folds every ace-king gives up 5.47%, and one who raises every ace-king 5.68%.
4 of the 2598960 hands, one deal in 649740. A straight flush of any other kind is one in 72193.33.
Of those priced here, the one paying 10 on a full house, 7 on a flush and 5 on a straight with a 200-to-1 royal, at 3.61%. A table that cuts two pair to even money is the one to avoid, at 10.12%.
47.77% of hands under the best play, nearly one in two. Every hand without a pair, ace-king aside, is a fold.