Mississippi Stud: Raise or Fold, Street by Street

Mississippi Stud asks you to commit money three separate times, with less information than you’d like at each. The exact strategy — derived by working through every possible state of the game — turns out to be simple at the extremes and interesting in the middle. Here’s how to think about each street.

The core principle: the pot is not yours

Before any rule, one mindset: money you’ve already bet is spent. At every street, the only question is whether the next wager has positive expected value given your cards. “I’ve got four antes in, I can’t fold now” is exactly backwards — a dead hand with a big pot behind it is a reason to stop paying, not to keep going. The exact strategy folds hands on 5th street with money in the pot whenever the last bet can’t pay for itself.

3rd street (two cards, before any reveal)

• Any pair → raise 3×. Even 2-2. A pair is the seed of trips (3:1) and two pair (2:1) with three cards to come, and mid/high pairs are already push-or-pay material. When you have the best of it, you want the maximum multiplier on the whole hand — this single rule is where most of the game’s value lives.
• A jack, queen, king, or ace → raise 1×. One card that can pair into the 1:1 tier keeps the hand alive cheaply.
• Two middle cards (6–10) → raise 1×. Two shots at the push tier is worth one unit — the push safety-net is worth more than it looks.
• 6-5 suited → raise 1×; 6-5 offsuit → fold. The most famous line in the game. The suited version adds straight-flush and flush equity that just barely crosses the threshold; remove the suit and it drops below. Our derivation reproduced this rule from raw math — it’s real, not folklore.
• Everything else → fold. That’s 43.6% of your hands, gone for a single ante. It feels tight; it’s optimal.

4th street (three cards)

Made a paying or pushing pair? Raise 3×. Still drawing? A 1× raise is right with meaningful equity — three to a flush or straight flush, three mids, or a high card plus live overcards. Two low unconnected offsuit cards next to a brick: fold, even though you’ve now paid twice.

5th street (four cards, one to come)

Now it’s arithmetic: 48 cards, count your winners. Made hands raise 3×. Genuine draws — four to a flush (9 outs at 6:1), four to an outside straight with high cards — raise. A hand that can only win by pairing a low card folds, regardless of the pot. This is the street where “protecting” sunk bets costs players the most; the exact strategy folds here on a meaningful fraction of hands that paid two streets already.

What the discipline buys you

Played exactly, the game costs 4.91% of an ante — 1.37% of your total action. Played loose (“I never fold after 3rd street”), the per-ante cost roughly doubles: every unnecessary street on a dead hand is a fresh donation at terrible odds.

Rather than memorize edge cases, practice against exact answers: our simulator checks every raise-or-fold call you make against the derived optimal strategy, live, on all three streets. Practice the streets free →