How To Win In Caribbean Stud Poker: Strategy and Hints
Caribbean Stud Poker is a game that is not the easiest to win. You should know it has a 5.26% built-in house advantage. This means for each $100 you play you should lose $5.26 in a long term run. The following strategy in not complicated, but allows keeping the house edge to minimum efficiently and manage bankroll fluctuations.
When the cards are dealt, any player faces the same problem of choice. Should you raise or fold? There are four possible results in this situation.
- You fold. In this case you lose your ante bet only.
- You raise and dealer doesn’t qualify. In this case you win your ante bet only.
- You raise, dealer qualifies and your hand beats dealer’s hand. You get either ante or raise bets.
- You choose to raise, dealer qualifies and his/her hand is stronger than yours. Here you lose both the ante bet and the raise bet.
No need to say all decisions are made depending on the amount of money you have and your current hand. There are some decisions that are obvious. For example, you have a strong hand like Flush. In this case most probably you will raise and hope that dealer qualifies. At the same time quite often it’s better to fold. These are multiple situations when you have a weak hand, for instance, no pair or Ace, or at least a King. But what should one do with less “vivid” combinations?
Let’s say you’ve got a pair. Go ahead and play it regardless of the dealer’s upcard. The statistics states pairs are dealt for about 42% of the time. There are 13 possible pairs in all. Seven from these 13 pairs are likely to win in the long run, in other words, they have a positive expectation. Next three pairs are less likely to win and so you should play them in case the dealer’s upcard is equal or lower than your pair. The last three pairs (2’s, 3’s and 4’s) have more chances to lose in the long run, so you should not expect profit from them.
Despite this avoiding playing pairs is not reasonable. When you fold each time you’ve got a pair, you lose your ante bet and casino’s house advantage increases up to 7%! As it has been mentioned earlier, a player as well as a dealer can expect getting a pair for about 42% of all the time. This means the dealer will have an unpaired hand in more than a half or deals. As you know, dealer can qualify with Ace-King hand and in this case a player with a pair will win both ante and raise bet. This happens approximately in 6% of all deals.
Next let’s pay attention to hands that do not contain a pair. If your hand contains neither a pair not an Ace-King combination, it’s time to fold. However there are some exceptions. Raise in case your hand has the following sequence A-K-Q-J-x and the dealer’s upcard is any from A-K-Q-x-x. Continue your game if a dealer has one of the following combinations and has at least one card matching yours – A-K-J-x-x, A-K-10-x-x. Matching card is important because this way there are less chances dealer’s got a pair.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Caribbean Stud Poker. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
