Is this Four Card Poker game played for real money?

No. The table uses play chips that have no value, cannot be bought, and cannot be cashed out or exchanged for anything. If you run out, you are handed another stack for free. There is no account and nothing to download.

Is Four Card Poker played against other players?

No. It is a house-banked casino table game. You play your best four cards against the dealer's best four, nobody else's hand affects yours, there is no bluffing and no pot, and the only decision is whether to fold or how much to raise. The payouts are fixed by the rules, and they favor the house.

What is the basic strategy for Four Card Poker?

The widely published basic strategy is three lines: raise 3 times the Ante with a pair of 10s or better, raise 1 times the Ante with a pair of 2s through 9s, and fold anything less. A straight, a flush or anything higher counts as better than a pair. It never makes the middle raise, and it never looks at the dealer's upcard, which is what keeps it short. The exact best play does use the upcard, and differs from the strategy's on about 6.9% of hands. The coach grades every decision against the exact best play, not the strategy, so a play that beats the strategy by the count is marked correct. It still teaches and highlights the strategy's own line, and names both plays whenever they disagree. Grading is of the decision, not the outcome: a correct play can still lose the hand.

What is the house edge in Four Card Poker?

Two figures, depending on how the hand is played. Playing the published basic strategy, about 3.6% of the Ante with the rules used here, a simulated figure. Playing the exact best option on every hand, about 3.0%. Neither is "the" house edge on its own; this page labels each one. In the strategy's own simulation it folds about 44% of hands, raises 1 times the Ante on 25% and 3 times on 31%, and wins about 54% of the hands it raises. Both edges are quoted against the Ante because that is the bet you choose. The raises put more chips on the table, so the cost per chip actually bet is lower than either figure, but the cost per hand is what the Ante figures say.

Does the basic strategy cost anything compared to playing it perfectly?

Yes, and the cost is measured rather than assumed. Counting the dealer's hidden cards exactly, the exact best play differs from the taught strategy on about 6.9% of a seeded sample of 5,000 hands (standard error ± 0.4 percentage points), and gives up about 0.0065 Antes a hand on average across every hand played, strategy and non-strategy alike (standard error ± 0.0005). Three patterns cover most of it: a low pair folds against a high upcard rather than taking the smallest raise, a strong pair (tens through kings) takes the smallest raise rather than the largest against a higher upcard, and a middling pair takes the largest raise rather than the smallest against a low upcard. The strategy is still worth learning: it is three lines instead of a count only a computer can run at the table, for an average cost of about 0.0065 Antes a hand.

Free Four Card Poker

Five cards against the dealer's six, the best four of each, and a coach that grades every fold or raise against a strategy short enough to remember.

Play chips

1,000

No real money, no prizes, nothing to buy.

One deck · shuffled every hand

Dealer

You

25 chips down, and up to 75 more if you raise.

AntePays 1 to 125

Raise1 to 3 Antes0

BonusOn the Ante0

Ante bonus pays, to 1:: Four of a kind 25 · Straight flush 20 · Three of a kind 2
Four-card hands rank:: four of a kind, straight flush, three of a kind, flush, straight, two pair, pair, high card

Session coach

Coach me as I play

Last round

Nothing played yet. After each of your hands the coach says what the round cost and what decided it.

Decide the cost before you start

Gambling is entertainment with a price, like a concert ticket. The useful question is not how much you might win but how much the evening is allowed to cost. Pick that number first, and treat reaching it as the end of the session. You can set one below and the coach will hold you to it.

Next bet

25 chips at a 3.61% house edge: an expected cost of 0.9 chips.

This table is for practice and entertainment only. How to keep gambling safe

Strategy coach

Every fold or raise is graded against the exact best play, counted hand by hand against every card the dealer could be holding. The table also teaches basic strategy, the three lines below: it looks only at your own hand, so it is easy to play from memory, and it is close to optimal without being optimal. Where the two disagree, the coach names both and says what the gap is worth. The cards decide whether a hand wins. The decision is the part you control.

Basic strategy, close to optimal
Your best four cards	Play
Pair of 10s or better	Raise 3x the Ante
Pair of 2s through 9s	Raise 1x the Ante
Anything less	Fold

Outline the strategy play before I act

Set this game's cost against the other poker-style table games

This session

Hands played: 0
Strategy plays: None yet
Net chips: 0
Expected: 0; 0 in Antes at 3.6%, simulated
Ante bonuses paid: 0; Included in net chips
On the table at a full raise: 100; Ante plus 3 Antes, per hand

Expected is the house edge taken on the Antes you have put down. That edge is simulated, and it is the cost of playing basic strategy on every hand, as a share of the Ante. Optimal play costs slightly less, and plays that are not the strategy's usually cost more. A short session swings well away from it in either direction.

Built by Alexander Korsager · last updated October 4, 2026 · corrections

House edge on the Ante under basic strategy, simulated: 3.6%
Of hands the strategy folds: 44%
Of hands it raises 3 times the Ante: 31%
Of the hands it raises, the share it wins: 54%

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Three lines, graded every hand

Four Card Poker is a casino table game against the house, not poker against other players.

Nobody bluffs and there is no pot. You are dealt five cards and make your best four-card hand, the dealer is dealt six and does the same, and you see one of the dealer's cards before choosing to fold or to raise one, two or 3 times your Ante. The dealer's extra card is the house's advantage. Yours is that you choose the size of the raise after seeing your hand, and that you win ties.

5 cards against 6, the best 4 of each

Dealer, 6 cards: one up, 5 down

You, 5 cards: pair of queens

Fold
Raise 1x
Raise 2x
Raise 3x

The dealer's extra card is the house's advantage. Yours is choosing the size of the raise after seeing your hand, and winning ties.

The decision has a widely published basic strategy that fits in three lines: raise 3 times the Ante with a pair of 10s or better, raise 1 times the Ante with a pair of 2s through 9s, and fold anything less.

It is close to optimal, not optimal, and the gap is measured rather than guessed at: dealing the dealer every hand they could hold, the exact best play differs from the strategy's on about 6.9% of hands (± 0.4pp, over a seeded sample of 5,000), costing about 0.0065 Antes a hand on average across every hand played. The coach grades every fold or raise against the exact best play, and names the strategy's play too whenever the two disagree.

The whole strategy, three lines

Pair of 10s or better. Here: pair of kings.Raise 3x the AnteAbout 31% of hands
Pair of 2s through 9s. Here: pair of 7s.Raise 1x the AnteAbout 25% of hands
Anything less. Here: less than a pair.FoldAbout 44% of hands

Shares are from a simulation of 6,000,000 hands. The strategy never makes the middle raise and never looks at the dealer's upcard.

Played by the taught strategy the game costs about 3.6% of every Ante, a simulated figure.

Played by the exact best play on every hand it costs about 3.0%. Neither figure is "the" house edge of Four Card Poker: they are the cost of two different ways to play it, and this page labels each one wherever it appears. Practice keeps the cost down toward one of them. It does not remove either.

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Rules at this table

The deal

Cards you are dealt: 5
Cards the dealer is dealt: 6
Cards that make a hand: 4
The largest raise, in Antes: 3x

Each side plays its best four-card hand, and the dealer picks from one card more.

Ante bonus

Your hand	Bonus pays
Four of a kind	25 to 1
Straight flush	20 to 1
Three of a kind	2 to 1

Paid on the Ante, by your hand, whenever you raise, even when the dealer beats it.

One 52-card deck, shuffled before every hand.
Bet the Ante to be dealt in. You get 5 cards. The dealer gets 6: one face up, and the rest face down until you decide.
Then either fold, which gives up the Ante, or raise. A raise is one, two or 3 times the Ante, and the size is your choice.
Each side plays its best four-card hand. Four-card hands rank, from the top: four of a kind, straight flush, three of a kind, flush, straight, two pair, pair, high card. Three of a kind beats a flush and a straight here, because with four cards it is the rarer hand. Suits never break a tie.
The dealer always qualifies. There is no minimum hand the dealer needs.
If your hand is higher than the dealer's, or exactly ties it, the Ante and the raise both pay 1 to 1. If the dealer's is higher, both lose.
There is no side bet at this table.
The Ante takes 5 to 200 chips, and the table only takes an Ante you can also cover the largest raise for.
F
Fold
1
Raise 1x
2
Raise 2x
3
Raise 3x
Enter
Deal

FAQ

Is this Four Card Poker game played for real money?: No. The table uses play chips that have no value, cannot be bought, and cannot be cashed out or exchanged for anything. If you run out, you are handed another stack for free. There is no account and nothing to download.
Is Four Card Poker played against other players?: No. It is a house-banked casino table game. You play your best four cards against the dealer's best four, nobody else's hand affects yours, there is no bluffing and no pot, and the only decision is whether to fold or how much to raise. The payouts are fixed by the rules, and they favor the house.
What is the basic strategy for Four Card Poker?: The widely published basic strategy is three lines: raise 3 times the Ante with a pair of 10s or better, raise 1 times the Ante with a pair of 2s through 9s, and fold anything less. A straight, a flush or anything higher counts as better than a pair. It never makes the middle raise, and it never looks at the dealer's upcard, which is what keeps it short. The exact best play does use the upcard, and differs from the strategy's on about 6.9% of hands. The coach grades every decision against the exact best play, not the strategy, so a play that beats the strategy by the count is marked correct. It still teaches and highlights the strategy's own line, and names both plays whenever they disagree. Grading is of the decision, not the outcome: a correct play can still lose the hand.
What is the house edge in Four Card Poker?: Two figures, depending on how the hand is played. Playing the published basic strategy, about 3.6% of the Ante with the rules used here, a simulated figure. Playing the exact best option on every hand, about 3.0%. Neither is "the" house edge on its own; this page labels each one. In the strategy's own simulation it folds about 44% of hands, raises 1 times the Ante on 25% and 3 times on 31%, and wins about 54% of the hands it raises. Both edges are quoted against the Ante because that is the bet you choose. The raises put more chips on the table, so the cost per chip actually bet is lower than either figure, but the cost per hand is what the Ante figures say.
Does the basic strategy cost anything compared to playing it perfectly?: Yes, and the cost is measured rather than assumed. Counting the dealer's hidden cards exactly, the exact best play differs from the taught strategy on about 6.9% of a seeded sample of 5,000 hands (standard error ± 0.4 percentage points), and gives up about 0.0065 Antes a hand on average across every hand played, strategy and non-strategy alike (standard error ± 0.0005). Three patterns cover most of it: a low pair folds against a high upcard rather than taking the smallest raise, a strong pair (tens through kings) takes the smallest raise rather than the largest against a higher upcard, and a middling pair takes the largest raise rather than the smallest against a low upcard. The strategy is still worth learning: it is three lines instead of a count only a computer can run at the table, for an average cost of about 0.0065 Antes a hand.

How this game works

Every hand is dealt from one 52-card deck, shuffled in your browser with a Fisher-Yates shuffle so that every ordering is equally likely. Nothing about the deal depends on your bets, your balance or your results. Hands are ranked by a four-card evaluator that is tested against all 270,725 possible four-card hands: it counts each kind of hand at its known frequency and breaks ties card by card. The best four of your five and of the dealer's six are found by scoring every way of choosing four.

The coach grades against a count, not only a rule. Pricing a decision exactly means dealing the dealer every set of hidden cards behind the upcard: 46 cards are unseen, which makes 1,370,754 dealer hands, each needing its best four of six found. That is too slow to run while the table is animating, so it runs in a background worker after every decision rather than on the main thread, and the coach's two-verdict line fills in once the worker answers. The published basic strategy is still taught and still highlighted on every hand: it is what the table's strategy column names, and it is close to optimal, not optimal.

The house edge under basic strategy is simulated, because this game has no row in the house edge comparison to read it from and is too large to count exactly here. 6,000,000 hands were dealt from a seeded shuffle and each was played by the basic strategy. The tallies of that run are fixed in the game's code, and a test re-runs it and requires the same result. The same test holds a second, independent run to that figure within a set tolerance, which is why that edge is printed to one decimal place and the shares as whole percents. The expected figure in the session panel is that edge taken on the Antes you have put down.

The strategy's cost against the exact best play, and the exact-play edge derived from it, come from a second, separate measurement: a seeded sample of 5,000 hands (seed 20261004), each priced exactly by dealing the dealer every hand it could hold, the same count the table's own worker runs. That sample size was chosen because the gap on any one hand is small and the comparison is paired (the same hand's strategy play and exact play are both counted, so the hand's own luck cancels out of the difference), unlike the house edge above, whose per-hand result swings far more and needs many more hands to pin down. The share of hands that differ and the mean gap are both published with their standard error, so the size of the sampling uncertainty is stated rather than implied. The exact-play edge is not sampled separately: it is the pinned strategy edge less the measured mean gap, since both are in the same unit (Antes per hand).

Limits

The exact-count grading runs in a worker after your decision, not before it. The coach's line starts from the strategy alone and fills in the exact verdict a moment later, so on a very slow device the two-verdict line can lag a beat behind the result.
The strategy-versus-exact gap figures are a seeded sample, not every starting hand. The standard errors on this page say how much sampling uncertainty that leaves; a different seed would not reproduce the same hands, but should land within that error of the same figures.
The house edge under basic strategy is simulated and quoted to one decimal place: an estimate with a small sampling error, not an exact count. The exact-play edge is derived from it and from the sampled gap above, not sampled on its own.
Most casino tables offer a side bet on the player's hand, and some pay a different Ante bonus. This table does not deal the side bet. A different bonus table has a different house edge.
Play chips do not feel like money. Decisions that are easy here are harder with a real stake on the table.

This is a practice game for adults. It has no real-money play and links to none. Four Card Poker played for money has a house edge on every hand, and no amount of practice removes it.

Gambling can cause serious harm. The National Problem Gambling Helpline is free, confidential and open 24/7, call or text 1-800-MY-RESET (1-800-697-3738), or chat at ncpgambling.org/chat.

03 / 03

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House edge comparison What the other poker-style table games cost, side by side.

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