Games · Mississippi Stud
Mississippi Stud: three streets, one pot
The carnival game with real escalation: ante, two cards, and then three separate raise-or-fold decisions as the community cards land — with every bet you make paying the same odds on your final hand. Optimal play folds 44% of hands and still averages 3.59 antes in the pot. The edge is 4.91% of an ante but just 1.37% of the money you actually bet — both numbers exact, from a full 156-million-state derivation.
Set your ante and deal.
Free game, fun credits only — no real money. Every bet (ante included) pays the final hand; a pair of 6s–10s pushes. Optimal play folds ~44% of hands — the hints show the exact call.
The dashed gold line is the exact per-ante house edge, 4.91%, from the full ~156M-state derivation — the sim only validates it. Swings here are the wildest of our carnival games: winning hands routinely have 4–10 antes riding, and the 500:1 royal pays on all of them. Watch how often the line spends time far from its destination — that's 1.37% per dollar wagered doing its work across 3.59 antes a hand.
Mississippi Stud is the highest-stakes carnival game on the site: you make three separate raise-or-fold calls, and by the river an average hand has 3.59 antes in the pot — all of it paying (or losing) at the same odds. There's no dealer, so the whole game is solvable: every figure below is exact, from a full 3-street backward induction over ~156 million states.
(per ante, exact)
(per dollar actually bet)
under optimal play
The paytable and the exact final-hand odds
Every wager — the ante and all three street bets — pays these odds on the final 5-card hand. The middle tier is the game's signature: a pair of 6s through 10s pushes (you get everything back but win nothing).
| Final hand | Pays (every bet) | Probability |
|---|---|---|
| Royal flush | 500 to 1 | 0.0002% |
| Straight flush | 100 to 1 | 0.0014% |
| Four of a kind | 40 to 1 | 0.0240% |
| Full house | 10 to 1 | 0.1441% |
| Flush | 6 to 1 | 0.1965% |
| Straight | 4 to 1 | 0.3925% |
| Three of a kind | 3 to 1 | 2.11% |
| Two pair | 2 to 1 | 4.75% |
| Pair, jacks or better | 1 to 1 | 13.00% |
| Pair, 6s–10s | PUSH | 16.25% |
| Everything else | all bets lose | 63.12% |
The exact 3rd-street strategy (derived, not memorized)
- Raise 3× with any pair — even a pair of deuces (it can only improve, and trips pay 3:1 on an ever-growing pot).
- Raise 1× with any jack or better, or two cards 6+ (two chances at a paying or pushing pair).
- Raise 1× with 6-5 suited — the famous exception; the straight-flush potential just barely clears the bar. 6-5 offsuit folds.
- Fold everything else — that's a full 44% of hands, gone for one ante. Chasing with a low hand feeds three streets of bad bets.
Our derivation computes the optimal call at every state from scratch — and it lands exactly on the published expert strategy, 6-5-suited quirk included. On 4th and 5th street the simulator computes the exact EV live rather than using rules at all.
Why two very different edge numbers
The 4.91% headline is your expected loss measured against one ante — the highest of our carnival games. But Mississippi Stud escalates: with 3.59 antes wagered on an average hand, the cost per dollar actually bet is just 1.37% — one of the lowest on the floor. Both are true. What they mean together: the game is fairly priced per dollar, but it makes you put a lot of dollars in — expect big swings relative to your ante.
How this simulation works
- Rules modeled
- Standard Mississippi Stud, single 52-card deck, independent hands. The player antes and receives two hole cards; three community cards complete the final five. Before each community card is revealed (3rd, 4th, and 5th street) the player must either raise 1×–3× the ante or fold, forfeiting everything already wagered. Every wager — the ante and all street bets — is paid by the final 5-card hand: jacks-or-better 1:1, two pair 2:1, trips 3:1, straight 4:1, flush 6:1, full house 10:1, quads 40:1, straight flush 100:1, royal 500:1; a pair of 6s–10s pushes; anything less loses all bets. Stakes are fun credits in integer cents.
- Assumptions
- Hands are independent (a freshly shuffled deck each round). Optimal play: the 3rd-street decision comes from the frozen exact table (169 canonical two-card classes, derived — not transcribed); the 4th- and 5th-street decisions are computed exactly at runtime from the state's expected values. Fun credits only, no real money.
- Mathematical basis
- Every figure is EXACT — no dealer means the whole game is enumerable. The house edge (4.9149% per ante), element of risk (1.3691%), average total wager (3.5898 antes), fold rate (43.6%), and the final-hand distribution are derived by a 3-street backward induction over all 1,326 starting hands × 50 × 49 × 48 ordered reveals (~156M states), tracking value and expected wager through every optimal decision. The derived 3rd-street strategy independently reproduces the published expert rules, including the 6-5-suited exception. The Lab's Monte-Carlo (one continuous seeded RNG stream) only validates the derivation.
- Engine version
- mississippi-stud engine 1.0
- Validation
- 18 unit tests + an opt-in slow test — the 5-card payer (all tiers incl. the jacks-pay / 6s–10s-push / 5s-lose splits, wheel + royal), the frozen exact figures vs published (4.91% / 1.37% / 3.59), the full 169-class 3rd-street table (3× any pair; 1× jack-plus, two mids, and 6-5 suited; fold 6-5 offsuit), exact 4th/5th-street decisions on canonical states, payout mechanics (all wagers pay; pushes return; folds forfeit exactly the wagered amount), determinism, and a 100,000-hand continuous-stream convergence. The slow test re-runs the full ~156M-state derivation and must reproduce the frozen figures AND the strategy table bit-for-bit.
- Last reviewed
- Verified by exact enumeration end-to-end. The strongest cross-check of the trio: the derivation independently reproduced the published optimal strategy — including its least-obvious rule — before matching all three published financial figures to 4 decimal places. Last reviewed 2026-07-13.