Three Card Poker Cheating
Three Card Poker is not only a fun casino game with a relatively low house edge, but also one of the games that can lend itself to cheating or collusion. Under the right circumstances, Three Card Poker can become a rather profitable game for the player!
The easiest form of Three Card Poker collusion is looking at the cards held by other players at your table. By seeing what other cards are held by your neighbors, you can get a better idea of what the dealer is not holding. If the players are holding a lot of aces, kings and queens, it’s likely that the dealer will not qualify; in that case, raising with any hand is the smart play, since you’re much more likely to win the ante by default. Of course, the rules of Three Card Poker technically do not allow players to look at each other’s hands for this very reason, but when playing for small amounts of money, the enforcement of this rule can sometimes be fairly lax.
Of course, it’s much more helpful to know exactly what the dealer is holding rather than having to guess! Normally, this isn’t possible; dealers are generally careful to protect their hands when dealer. However, some dealers are sloppy, and this can lead to an advantage play for the Three Card Poker player. If the dealer accidentally reveals the rank of just one card while he’s dealing his own hand, the game turns into one in which the player has a significant advantage over the house. If the dealer reveals this card every time, and the player uses proper strategy, the player edge is over 3%!
It might surprise you to know that having just a little information changes the game so drastically, but it’s really quite simple. In Three Card Poker, the dealer “folds” if he doesn’t make a qualifying hand of queen-high or better. If the dealer is unintentionally revealing a card, you have a lot of insight about whether or not the dealer is going to qualify. If the dealer reveals a jack or lower, the odds of him having a qualifying hand are significantly reduced, and you should raise with any hand! If you have a high-card hand you’d normally keep, but the dealer reveals a higher card, you can now safely fold. This doesn’t mean you’ll win any time, but the slight house edge is gone, and now you’re the one who will win in the long run. Even if you can only tell if the card is a face card or not, that’s enough to give you some edge.
3 Card Poker Collusion
As pointed out by the Wizard of Odds, there’s also an advantage play that can be done in collusion with the dealers. Many casinos will let you tip a dealer by placing an ante bet for them, but the player doesn’t need to raise on the tip. This actually makes the tip a better bet than the initial ante bet for the player, so if you can get away with making very large “tips” and very small initial ante bets, the combined bets have a very large edge for the player/dealer. Of course, this strategy is very visible and obvious, not to mention that even if you could get away with it, many casinos pool tips – meaning your friendly dealer wouldn’t be able to share the profits with you later anyway!
One last word of advice for players looking to get an advantage at Three Card Poker: don’t play the Pairplus bet. Everyone else at the table may tell you that you’re being foolish, but there’s no way to win at the Pairplus bet in the long run; the house will always hold an edge on this bet.