Three Card Poker Odds

Exact hand frequencies, the Q-6-4 rule, and house edge on Ante-Play and every Pair Plus pay table.

This prices the standard Ante-Play game, the Pair Plus bet on the pay table you pick, 6 Card Bonus on the schedule you pick, Prime, and the progressive on the mechanic and prizes you enter. It publishes no progressive pay table of its own: the pay tables in circulation for that bet vary in ways this tool could not source with confidence, so the mechanic and every fixed prize are numbers you supply off your own table's sign rather than a schedule this page asserts.

Dealer

Your hand

Example deal

Queen-Six-Four, the weakest hand the rule backs with a Play bet.

Every bet on this felthouse edge, per unit staked

Every three-card hand

Hand1 inChance

Straight flush1 in 4600.217%
Three of a kind1 in 4250.235%
Straight1 in 30.73.258%
Flush1 in 20.24.959%
Pair1 in 5.916.941%
High card / ace-high1 in 1.374.389%

Ante-Play house edge (optimal strategy)

Per ante posted

3.37%

How the game is usually quoted, against the one bet you always make.

Per unit wagered

2.01%

The same loss spread over the 1.67 units an average hand risks. This is the figure to set beside a game that never lets you fold.

Play rule

Q-6-4

or better

Dealer qualifies

69.6%

Ante bonus value

+5.29%

of ante

Avg total wager

1.67

units

Fold anything worse than Queen-Six-Four. The dealer needs Queen-high just to qualify, when they don’t, your Ante pays and the Play bet pushes, which is where much of your value comes from.

Written and reviewed by Alexander Korsager · last reviewed September 26, 2026 · corrections

The idea

Three Card Poker is two games on one layout. Ante-Play is a head-to-head hand against the dealer: you post an ante, see your three cards, then either fold or match the ante with a Play bet. Pair Plus is a separate bet that pays purely on the strength of your own three cards, whatever the dealer has.

With only three cards, the ranking flips: a straight beats a flush, because straights are rarer.Out of 22,100 possible hands there are 720 straights and 1,096 flushes. A pair or better comes around once every four hands (25.6%); trips or a straight flush are genuinely rare at roughly 1 in 425 and 1 in 460.
The base game has a simple, provably optimal rule: make the Play bet with Queen-Six-Four or better, and fold everything worse.Follow it and the house edge is about 3.37% per ante, or roughly 2.01% per unit actually wagered once you account for the hands you fold. Pair Plus depends entirely on the pay table on the felt, the good version costs about 2.3%, the common reduced-flush version about 7.3%. This tool shows both, and lets you compare pay tables side by side.
Two more bets share the same felt. 6 Card Bonus pays on the best five-card poker hand out of all six cards dealt, yours and the dealer's combined, whatever either hand is doing elsewhere on the table. Prime pays on card color alone, not rank: your own three cards one color, or better, all six cards one color. Both are priced here the same way as the rest of the page, by exact count rather than by a published percentage.
A progressive side bet shares this layout too, and it is the one thing here priced as a calculator rather than a table.Too many incompatible pay structures share the name for a single published edge to mean anything, so pick the mechanic on your felt, enter its posted prizes, and this tool derives the jackpot value where the bet stops costing you money, then reads today's meter against it.

FAQ

Questions players ask

Why does a straight beat a flush in Three Card Poker?

Because with three cards a straight is harder to make than a flush, 720 versus 1,096 out of 22,100 hands. The ranking always follows rarity, so the order changes from five-card poker.

What is the Q-6-4 strategy?

Make the Play bet whenever your hand is Queen-Six-Four or better; fold otherwise. It is the mathematically optimal cut-off and costs only a fraction of a percent more than playing a perfect, card-by-card strategy.

Should I play Pair Plus?

Only if the pay table is generous, a flush paying 4 rather than 3, a straight paying 6. Check the felt against the tables here. The reduced pay tables push the house edge above 7%, which is worse than almost anything else in the pit.

What does 6 Card Bonus pay on?

The best five-card poker hand out of your three cards and the dealer's three combined, three of a kind or better. It pays whatever the base game and Pair Plus are doing, and you are eligible even on a hand you fold. At the most generous of the four documented pay tables the house edge is about 8.56%; the others run as high as 15.28%, so the schedule on the felt matters a great deal.

What does the Prime side bet pay on?

Card color, not rank. Your own three cards all one color pays 3 to 1; all six cards on the felt, yours and the dealer's, being one color pays 4 to 1 instead. At 3.62% it is one of the cheaper side bets on this page, and it is a bet with no skill in it: you cannot change the color of the cards you are dealt.

How is the Three Card Poker progressive priced here?

As a calculator rather than a table. Pick the mechanic your felt runs, mini royal or five-card, and enter the fixed prizes and the current meter reading straight off the sign above it. The page derives the jackpot value where the bet's return reaches 100% and reads your own meter against it. No pay table is published: multiple incompatible mechanics share this name and the schedules we found could not be sourced with confidence, so every number on this tab comes from what you enter, not from a transcribed figure.

Methodology

How this is calculated

Every hand frequency here is an exact count, not a simulation. There are C(52,3) = 22,100 three-card hands, and each rank's share is simply how many of those hands make it: 48 straight flushes, 52 sets of trips, 720 straights, 1,096 flushes, 3,744 pairs and 16,440 high-card hands.

Pair Plus is priced straight off those counts, each rank's probability times what the selected pay table pays it, less the chance of losing the stake outright.

Both halves of that are printed: the paying ranks, then the hands that make nothing and lose the unit, then the total, which is the headline house edge with its sign the other way up.

The dealer's 69.6% qualifying rate and the 67.4% of hands the Q-6-4 rule backs with a Play bet are counted the same way, by walking all 22,100 hands rather than by trusting a published figure.

The rate is easier to check from the far side: exactly 6,720 hands fail to qualify a dealer, and every one of them is a hand with no pair, no straight and no flush, topped by a Jack or lower.

The two Ante-Play house edges are the exception, and they are cited rather than derived: pricing a player hand against a dealer hand needs the full head-to-head enumeration this tool does not run, so 3.37% per ante and 2.01% per unit wagered come from the Wizard of Odds. 6 Card Bonus and Prime are both fully derived rather than transcribed. 6 Card Bonus is an exact classification of all C(52,6) = 20,358,520 six-card combinations by the best five-card hand each one contains; Prime is exact combinatorics over a 26-red, 26-black deck.

Both are cross-checked against Wizard of Odds' published figures for the same bets and match to the combination, not just to a rounded percentage.

Common misreadings8

The percentage beside a Pair Plus rank is what that rank hands back per unit staked, not how often it lands. The two sit next to each other on the same line: a flush comes up about once in twenty hands and returns about 19.8 cents of every dollar staked, because it pays 4 to 1 when it does. The column adds up to the house edge, not to 100%.
The 3.37% and the 2.01% are one game measured against two different denominators, not two games. The first is the loss per ante posted; the second spreads that same loss over the 1.67 units an average hand actually puts at risk once the Play bet is counted, which is the number to compare against a game that never lets you fold.
The ante bonus is already inside the 3.37%, not a discount to subtract from it. It is shown on its own because it is the part of the game that pays whatever the dealer holds, and reading it as a rebate counts it twice.
The 30.4% of hands a dealer fails to qualify on is not a 30.4% windfall. The ante pays even money and the Play bet you matched it with is simply returned, so the hand gives back one unit on the two it had at risk, and the ante bonus is the only part of it that depends on what you were holding.
A hand frequency is per hand dealt, not per session. Trips at 1 in 425 is not a promise of one an evening, and the straight flush behind the largest payout on the felt is rarer still at 1 in 460.
Pair Plus winning 25.6% of hands is not a 25.6% chance of finishing ahead. Most of those wins are the pair that pays 1, and the difference between a 2.32% table and a 7.28% one sits entirely in the ranks above it.
6 Card Bonus, Pair Plus and Prime are three separate bets on three separate outcomes, not three views of one bet. Placing all three does not reduce variance the way a hedge would; it adds three independent house edges to the session.
If the break-even panel shows no dollar figure, that is not a table paying over 100% on its own, real signs do not run schedules like that. It is almost always a mis-typed entry, most often a meter reading dropped into a fixed-prize field. Check every number against the felt rather than reading it as a table in your favor.

Assumptions5

A single 52-card deck, one hand at a time, with the player's three cards and the dealer's three coming from the same deck.
Pair Plus, ante bonus and 6 Card Bonus pays are quoted 'to 1', so a flush paying 4 returns the stake plus four times it.
The Q-6-4 rule is the strategy in force. It is the standard optimal cut-off for the Play decision, and the cited 3.37% is the figure for playing it.
The ante bonus is the common table paying 5 for a straight flush, 4 for three of a kind and 1 for a straight. It is fixed here rather than selectable.
6 Card Bonus and Prime price the deal itself, not any strategy: neither bet gives the player a decision to make once the cards are down.

Limits5

The progressive is priced on the mechanic and prizes you enter, not on a schedule this site publishes. Multiple incompatible pay structures circulate under that name, and the most detailed transcribed table found produced an impossible baseline return, so nothing here assumes a schedule: the break-even meter follows only from the mechanic you pick and the fixed prizes you type in off the sign above the table. Two mechanics are covered, mini royal (your own three cards) and five-card (your three cards plus two community cards); a table running a different progressive mechanic is not covered here.
The four Pair Plus tables and four 6 Card Bonus tables above are the ones that ship, and they are selectable rather than editable. Casinos run others, and the figure shown always describes the table selected and not necessarily the one in front of you.
The two Ante-Play figures are transcribed, so they carry the precision they were published at and describe the standard game with the ante bonus above. A table that pays the ante differently when the dealer fails to qualify is a different game and these numbers do not transfer to it.
Prime ships at the one schedule found documented (3 to 1 / 4 to 1). A table paying differently is a different bet and this figure does not describe it.
Nothing here models a session. The distribution of one hand says nothing about how a run of them compounds, which is what a bankroll actually has to sit through.

Evidence

The hand counts are standard combinatorics, and enumeration.ts walks all 22,100 three-card hands to produce them rather than transcribing published figures. math.test.ts pins three things against that same walk: the six rank counts, the 6,720 hands that fail to qualify a dealer, and the 14,900 the Q-6-4 rule backs with a Play bet.

So neither the qualifying rate nor the strategy frequency can drift from the rule it describes. Every Pair Plus figure on the page is computed from the counts and the selected pay table.

The two Ante-Play house edges are the only transcribed numbers here: the Wizard of Odds publishes 3.37% per ante and a 2.01% element of risk for the standard game (retrieved 2026-09-07), and math.test.ts holds the pair to the relationship that ties them together, the edge per ante spread over the 1.674 units an average hand stakes. 6 Card Bonus's frequency table is generated by scripts/three-card-poker/generate-six-card-bonus.mjs, which classifies all 20,358,520 six-card combinations by their best five-card hand using this site's own poker-hand evaluator, and six-card-bonus.test.ts reproduces Wizard of Odds' published combination counts exactly (royal flush at 188 through three of a kind at 732,160, retrieved 2026-09-12) plus every documented pay schedule's edge to two decimals.

Prime's two counts, 9,209,200 for a six-card color match and 86,595,600 for a three-card one out of 407,170,400 deals, are closed-form combinatorics over a 26-red, 26-black deck, and prime.test.ts matches the same counts and the resulting 3.62% edge against Wizard of Odds' published figures for the bet.

The progressive publishes no house edge at all, only a break-even meter derived from whatever mechanic and prizes the reader enters: mini royal's four-hands-per-deal split (three fixed, one jackpot) is exact combinatorics over this game's own 22,100-hand deal space, and the five-card mechanic's frequencies are the closed-form C(52,5) standard poker hand distribution, the same nine-category breakdown published everywhere from Wizard of Odds to any poker probability reference, cross-checked here against Wizard of Odds' figures (retrieved 2026-09-12) rather than transcribed from them. progressive.test.ts pins every category count this bet prices, the two that feed the break-even formula and the seven it does not need, so a change to that formula fails CI before it reaches the page.

A passing test means the code matches the model, not that a given casino's table matches the pay tables shown, and for the progressive there is no pay table on this page to match against at all: only the reader's own.

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.

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