Four Card Poker: Rules, Odds and Strategy

By Vinoth Kanna · 28 July 2026

Casino Poker · Rules

Four card poker is a casino table game, not a home game: you receive five cards and make your best four, the dealer receives six and makes their best four, and one of the dealer’s cards is exposed the whole time. The dealer has no qualifying hand requirement — but to compensate, you may bet up to three times your ante on the Play, an option no other common table poker game gives you.

That trade is the entire game. Understanding it is what separates a cheap seat from an expensive one.

How a hand plays out

1. Post an Ante. The Aces Up side bet is optional and independent.
2. You are dealt five cards face down; the dealer is dealt six, one face up.
3. Look at your five, pick your best four, and decide: fold (you lose the ante) or make a Play bet of 1x, 2x or 3x the ante.
4. The dealer turns over their six cards and makes their best four. There is no qualifier — the dealer always plays.
5. Beat the dealer and both Ante and Play pay 1:1. Lose and both bets lose. Ties go to the dealer.
6. An Ante Bonus is paid on three of a kind or better in your hand, regardless of whether you beat the dealer.

Two rules above do all the damage. The dealer sees six cards to your five, and the dealer wins ties. Those are the house’s edge; the 3x Play option and the Ante Bonus are what you get back.

Four-card hand rankings — flush beats straight

Ranked from strongest:

Note the order: a flush beats a straight here, the opposite of three-card poker, where a straight beats a flush. The reason is that hand frequency changes with the number of cards you are choosing from. Building your best four out of five dealt cards, a four-card run turns up in roughly 4.8% of deals while four cards of one suit turn up in roughly 4.5% — the flush is genuinely the rarer hand at this size, so it ranks higher. In three-card poker the relationship reverses, which is why the rankings do too. If the shifting order confuses you, the fixed five-card rankings on the poker hands page are the baseline every variant deviates from.

The six-card dealer: what you are actually up against

Two exact numbers explain why four card poker feels harder than it looks.

• Your five cards contain at least a pair 49.3% of the time.
• The dealer’s six cards contain at least a pair 65.5% of the time.

The dealer will hold a pair or better in roughly two hands out of three, while you manage it in fewer than half. That gap is not a fluke of a paytable — it is built into the deal. It also explains why the correct strategy folds far more often than beginners expect, and why the exposed dealer card is worth reading: it is the single piece of information that tells you whether that 65.5% is likely to be a big pair or a small one.

Basic strategy

A widely used simplified approach, which captures most of the available value:

• Bet 3x with a pair of tens or better. These hands are favourites against the dealer’s average holding, and when you are a favourite you want the biggest bet the game allows. Betting 1x here is the most common and most expensive error at the table.
• Bet 1x with small and medium pairs. A pair of threes through a pair of nines is usually worth continuing, but it is not worth a maximum bet against a six-card hand.
• Fold hands below a pair. No-pair holdings are underdogs against a dealer who pairs 65.5% of the time and wins ties on top of it. The exception is the strongest no-pair hands (ace-king-high and better) when the dealer’s exposed card is low, where the decision is close to a coin flip.

Because the dealer’s up card shifts the correct line at the margins, published full-strategy charts adjust the cutoffs by that card. If you play regularly, work from one of those. If you play occasionally, the three rules above will keep you close to optimal without memorising anything.

The single most valuable habit: treat the 3x bet as the default for good hands, not as a special move. A game that gives you a variable bet size and gives the dealer none is a game where under-betting your strong hands throws away the only structural advantage you have.

The Ante Bonus

The Ante Bonus pays on the strength of your own four-card hand whether or not you beat the dealer, and it is the reason the ante is not simply dead money on a losing hand. A typical schedule:

Paytables vary between casinos and between machines on the same floor. A table paying 20:1 on quads instead of 25:1 raises the house edge on every hand you play there. Read the felt before you sit — this is the cheapest edge-saving habit in the pit.

Note what is not on the list: straights, flushes and two pair earn no bonus. The bonus only rewards genuinely rare hands, so it does not change how you play marginal holdings.

Aces Up

Aces Up is a separate wager on your own five cards making a four-card hand of a pair of aces or better. It is resolved independently — you are paid even if you folded the main hand. A common schedule runs from 1:1 on a pair of aces up through 50:1 on four of a kind, with the middle rungs (two pair, straight, flush, trips) varying meaningfully between properties.

The house edge on Aces Up is roughly 4% on typical paytables, noticeably worse than the main game. That is normal for side bets: they buy variance and the occasional large payout at a measurably higher long-run cost. There is no strategy component — you either make the bet or you don’t.

House edge and what strategy actually buys you

Under correct play the house edge on the Ante/Play game is in the region of 3% of the ante, and lower again when measured against total money wagered, since the 3x Play bets inflate the denominator. The precise figure depends on the Ante Bonus schedule posted at your table.

Two things follow, and they matter more than any chart:

1. Correct strategy reduces the edge. It never removes it. Four card poker is a house game. There is no line of play, no betting pattern and no progression that makes it profitable over time, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling something.
2. The main game is the good bet on the table. Aces Up costs roughly 4%, the Ante/Play game roughly 3%. If you are going to play, put your money where the edge is smallest and treat the side bet as entertainment spending.

If you want the same decision-making style in a game where the mathematics is even tighter, the optimal chart for Ultimate Texas Hold’em is the lowest-edge table poker game most casinos spread. And if you want a game where skill genuinely sets the result rather than merely shaving a fixed edge, that is real poker against other players — start with Hold’em starting hands and work through the rest of the strategy library.

Whatever you play, set a loss limit before you sit down and treat the money as spent. Our responsible gaming page covers the practical guardrails.

Keep learning: try the free poker odds calculator, memorize the hand rankings, or browse all strategy guides.