Book a good primer for Three Card Poker

By Mark Lasser

Three Card Poker is an increasingly available and popular game and yet very little has been written about it, and certainly not with the authority that Avery Cardoza brings to the table.

Avery owns his own publishing company and made his mark as a professional blackjack player in the ‘70s. The game is fairly simple and if the casino chooses to use a fair pay table, it can be one of the best games in the casino.

Cardoza’s book, “How to Beat Three Card Poker,” does an excellent job explaining the game as well as casino etiquette, comp programs and odds. It’s not a particularly anecdotal book, as the game and the odds are presented in a very straightforward manner. If you’re looking for a primer or a book that helps you identify good and bad pay tables and strategies, this is a perfect, direct and comprehensive overview of the game.

I will offer a small word of warning: The first edition has a few typos that you need to be careful of, so if something seems wrong, it might be. Hopefully the mistakes will be fixed in the second printing. The strategies he offers will help you identify the best games, and he even has a betting strategy that I hadn’t seen before. The last part of the book has sound advice on money management that can be applied to any casino game. Overall, it’s a great resource for a game that doesn’t get a lot of strategy attention.

If you’re unfamiliar with the game, Three Card Poker is played between the casino and the players at a semi-circle table like you might find at blackjack or pai gow. There are generally three betting areas and sometimes a bonus area. The dealer uses a standard 52-card deck and shuffles before each hand.

Unlike regular poker, there’s no bluffing and the hand rankings are different than for standard poker. The basic bet in this game is the “ante” bet, which will have a minimum of typically $5. That’s the bet you need to place to be dealt a hand. Each player and the dealer get three cards face down. You can look at your cards to see if you like them. The first decision you have to make is to fold or to continue to play the game. If you fold, you lose your ante. If you want to see if your hand is better than the dealer, then you need to commit an additional wager on the rectangle labeled “Play” for an amount equal to the “ante.”

In this game the dealer has to “qualify” their hand. This just means they have to have at least a queen high or better. If they don’t qualify, you get paid even money on your “ante” bet and they return your “play” bet. If they do qualify, then there’s a showdown. If the dealer has a better hand than yours, you lose both bets. If you have a better hand then the dealer, then you get paid even money on the “ante bet and the “play” bet. You also get a bonus on the “ante” bet if it’s a three-card straight, three of a kind or three-card straight flush.

All casinos pretty much pay even money bonuses for three card straights. The best table for straight flushes and three-of-a-kinds are 5:1 and 4:1 respectively, which offers the casino only a 2% edge. More commonly, you’ll find them paying 3:1 and 2:1 respectively, which increase the house edge to 2.56% – still not half bad.

In Colorado, the Department of Revenue approves a variety of pay tables and rules that the casinos can adopt for different games. For this game, they’ve approved 17 different pay tables, but pretty much all of our casinos use the same one. The bad news is that the Pair Plus bonus they’ve all agreed to is one of the most unfavorable for the player.

This “pair plus” bet must be made before cards are dealt. This is independent of winning or losing the hand and is merely a bet on the strength of your hand regardless of a win or loss to the dealer. The pay table for these bets should be 40:1 for a straight flush, 30:1 for a three of a kind, 6:1 for a three card straight, 4:1 for a flush and even money for a pair.

With this pay table the house edge is a very reasonable 2.32%. The bad news in Colorado is most casinos only pay 3:1 for the flush, a fairly common hand, and that changes the casino advantage to 7.28%. If you want the big payout and don’t mind the big house edge, by all means have fun with it. But otherwise stick to the “ante” and “play” bets. “How to Beat Three Card Poker” is available at Amazon.com and at www.gamblersbookclub.com.

Mark B. Lasser is Denver writer and international poker player. He regularly plays in Colorado, Arizona, California, Missouri and Nevada. Readers can send questions and comments to him at ColoradoPokerMark@comcast.net.