- Rules modeled
- Standard Three Card Poker, single 52-card deck, independent hands. The player antes and gets 3 cards, then either raises a Play bet equal to the ante or folds (forfeiting the ante). The dealer's 3 cards then show; the dealer 'qualifies' with Queen-high or better. If the dealer doesn't qualify, the Ante pays 1:1 and the Play bet pushes; if the dealer qualifies, the higher 3-card hand wins even money on both Ante and Play (a tie pushes). 3-card ranking, best to worst: straight flush, three of a kind, straight, flush, pair, high card (a straight beats a flush). The Ante Bonus pays on the ante regardless of the dealer: straight 1:1, three of a kind 4:1, straight flush 5:1. The optional Pair Plus side bet pays on the player's own 3 cards (default 1-3-6-30-40). Stakes are fun credits in integer cents.
- Assumptions
- Hands are independent (a freshly shuffled deck each round). Ace plays high or low in straights (A-K-Q high, A-2-3 low). Optimal strategy is to Play on Queen-6-4 or better and fold otherwise. This models the common US rules with the standard 1-4-5 Ante Bonus; Pair Plus paytables vary by casino (two are shown in the Odds tab). Fun credits only, no real money.
- Mathematical basis
- Every figure is exact, not simulated. Pair Plus is enumerated over all C(52,3)=22,100 hands; the Ante-Play house edge (3.37% per ante, 2.01% element of risk, 67.4% play rate) is computed over the full joint deal space C(52,3)·C(49,3) ≈ 407 million outcomes under optimal Q-6-4 play. The Play and Lab draw from the same engine; the Lab's Monte-Carlo only validates the exact edges, never redefines them.
- Engine version
- three-card-poker engine 1.0
- Validation
- Unit tests: the hand evaluator across all six categories including the wheel (A-2-3) and the straight-beats-flush rule; the dealer-qualify (Queen-high) and optimal-play (Queen-6-4) thresholds; the exact Pair Plus category counts (48/52/720/1096/3744/16440) and house edges vs the published figures (7.28% / 2.32%); the Ante-Play mechanic (dealer qualify, Ante Bonus paid even on a loss); seeded determinism; and a 200,000-hand convergence to 3.37%. Plus an opt-in slow test that reproduces the full 407M-deal Ante-Play enumeration exactly.
- Last reviewed
- Verified by exact unit tests against the published house edges (the odds are exact enumeration, not a solver); the full 407M-deal Ante-Play enumeration reproduces the shipped constant bit-for-bit. No separate independent-review gate was required for this engine. Last reviewed 2026-07-12.
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