The Easy Guide to Three Card Poker

Three Card Poker is a table game that is loosely based on the game of poker. It's considered by many industry experts to be the original casino table poker game, and so it's been able to gain a lot of fans over the years. A number of Microgaming casinos offer Three Card Poker, and since Microgaming is one of the most popular online casino software providers around, you're going to see it available in a lot of places. In what follows, we're going to teach you how to play this game and what strategies you have available.

There are two different bets that a player can make before the hand begins, and players can make any combination of one or both of the bets. The first bet is the Ante bet, and the second bet is the Pairplus bet. After you make your bets, you and the dealer are both given three cards, and the dealer's cards are face-down while your cards are face-up. At this point, if the player made an Ante bet, then the player has an option to either fold or raise. A fold means that you immediately give up your bet and any chances to win the hand, and a raise means that you match your Ante bet with a Plus bet of the same size.

If you decide to raise, then the dealer will turn over his or her cards and the showdown begins. If the dealer does not qualify with a Queen-high hand or better, then the player's Ante bet wins at 1:1 and the player's Push bet is considered a tie. If the dealer does qualify with a Queen-high hand or better, then the person with the best hand based on Three Card Poker rankings wins. The Three Card Poker rankings from best to worst are straight flush, three of a kind, straight, flush, one pair and Ace-high or less.

With the Pairplus bet, the player's hand is paid out based on a standardized pay table; the dealer's hand isn't considered with the Pairplus bet. A typical pay table for the Pairplus bet is 40x for a straight flush, 30x for three of a kind, 6x for a straight, 4x for a flush and 1x for a pair.

When you wager with the Pairplus bet, then you don't have any strategic options. However, with the standard Ante bet, you have the option to fold or raise once the cards are dealt. The best way to play the Ante bet in Three Card Poker is to always fold if you have a worse Three Card Poker hand than Queen-Six-Four. This is the perfect way to play Three Card Poker, so it's hard to go wrong if you can remember the hand Queen-Six-Four.