Pay tables, odds and house edge
Four separate pay tables run this game. Here they all are, together with the probability of every hand and what those two things multiply out to.
Maximum exposure assumes both antes plus 3x on Across, Down and Middle. With a $25 ante that is $250 at risk in a single round — worth knowing before you sit down.
Across, Down and Middle
These three wagers share one pay table. Across is graded on your Across hand, Down on your Down hand, and Middle on whichever of the two finishes higher.
Ante Across and Ante Down
The antes are flat money. They pay even money on any high pair or better and push on a low pair — a royal flush pays the ante exactly the same as a pair of Jacks does. All the upside sits on the Across, Down and Middle bets.
This is the single most important thing to understand about the game's economics. The antes are a toll you pay to be dealt in; the pay table is where the money actually is. That is why the published strategy raises the maximum so often.
The Five Card Bonus
An optional side bet scored on the five community cards alone. Your hole cards do not enter into it and neither do any of your decisions — it is settled the moment the centre card turns, whatever else you did.
House edge 3.53%, or an expected loss of 0.0353 units per unit wagered. Note that the bonus pays on any pair of 6s or better — it does not use the high-pair / low-pair split that the main table does.
Hand probabilities
Before you make a single decision, your Across hand and your Down hand are each just five random cards out of a 52-card deck. That means the standard five-card poker probabilities apply exactly.
2,598,960 total five-card combinations. The two hands share three cards, so they are strongly correlated with each other — but each one on its own follows the table above.
What the edge actually comes from
Multiply each payout by its probability and you get the return of a bet made blindly, with no folding and no bet sizing. Those figures are grim — and that gap is exactly what your three decisions are for.
| Wager | Blind return | What closes the gap |
|---|---|---|
| Ante (flat, never folded) | −42.49% | Folding the worst holdings, which is the only lever the antes give you. |
| Across / Down / Middle at 1x | −27.83% | Sizing up to 3x on strong holdings and skipping the hopeless ones. |
| Five Card Bonus | −3.53% | Nothing — there is no decision attached to it. |
| Whole game, played well | −4.33% | All three decisions together, measured against your required ante. |
Element of risk. The 4.33% figure is measured against the ante you are forced to post. Because good play involves pushing far more money in than the ante, the loss spread over everything you actually put at risk works out to about 1.48% — a genuinely competitive number for a casino table game.
House edge and element-of-risk figures follow the published analysis at Wizard of Odds. The blind-return figures on this page are computed directly from the pay tables and the combination counts above.
Now go and use them
The strategy page turns these tables into three simple decisions.