Three Card Poker

The Q-6-4 rule, and why it works

Three cards each, one choice

You and the dealer each receive three cards. After seeing yours, you either fold — surrendering the Ante — or match it with a Play bet equal to the Ante and go to a showdown.

The dealer qualifies with Queen high or better. If the dealer does not qualify, your Ante wins even money and your Play bet pushes, returning your stake. If the dealer does qualify and you win, both Ante and Play pay even money. A tie pushes both.

Ante Bonus is paid on strong hands regardless of the outcome — it pays even on a straight, four to one on three of a kind, and five to one on a straight flush. Pair Plus is entirely separate: it pays on your three cards alone whether or not you play the hand out and whether or not the dealer beats you.

Note that three-card hand rankings differ from five-card poker: a straight beats a flush here, because three-card straights are rarer than three-card flushes.

Play Q-6-4 or better, fold everything else

This is one of the few casino games with a strategy you can memorise in a sentence. Play any hand of Queen-Six-Four or better; fold anything worse. That single threshold is very close to optimal and costs almost nothing against a perfectly calculated decision.

The logic follows from the qualification rule. Folding costs you the Ante outright. Playing costs an additional bet but wins two units when the dealer qualifies and loses, and wins one unit while pushing the other when the dealer fails to qualify. Q-6-4 is the hand where those outcomes exactly balance — better than that and playing gains, worse and folding loses less.

To compare a hand, read it like a number: check the highest card first, then the second, then the third. King-anything is a play. Queen-Seven-Two is a play because the second card beats the six. Queen-Six-Three is a fold by one rank.

The two paytables

Pair Plus and Ante Bonus reward different hands at different rates, and both are paid on your cards alone rather than on the comparison against the dealer.

The gap between them is instructive. Pair Plus pays 30 to 1 on three of a kind while the Ante Bonus pays only 4 to 1 for the same hand, because Pair Plus is a standalone wager carrying its own risk whereas the Ante Bonus is a supplement to a bet you were making anyway. A flush pays 3 to 1 on Pair Plus and nothing at all as an Ante Bonus, which is why holding a flush makes the Pair Plus bet feel far more valuable than the Ante did.

Common mistakes

Three of these come from importing habits from five-card poker.

• Folding too much. Any Queen high with a decent second card is a play; folding marginal Queens gives up the Ante on hands that are profitable to contest.
• Playing every hand. The other extreme is just as costly — hands below Q-6-4 lose more by playing than by surrendering the Ante.
• Ranking a flush above a straight. In three-card poker the straight is rarer and therefore higher, which is the reverse of the five-card order.
• Folding to protect Pair Plus. Pair Plus is settled independently on your own three cards, so folding the Ante does nothing to it either way.

What is different about this version

The qualification rule is implemented exactly — the dealer qualifies on any pair or better, or on Queen high, evaluated against the real hand ranking rather than approximated. That precision is what makes the Q-6-4 threshold correct here rather than merely close.

Ante Bonus is paid whether or not the dealer qualifies and whether or not you win the comparison, which is how a live table plays it and is a rule frequently dropped in simplified versions. Pair Plus resolves entirely on your three cards, independent of the Ante contest.

Written by the Silverweb Games team from this game’s own implementation. Last reviewed July 31, 2026.