Basic strategy for the ante-bet portion of Three Card Poker is to make the bet of equal to your ante any time you’re dealt Queen-6-4 or better, but to fold and forfeit your ante with lower-ranking hands.
That strategy led a reader to email me with two questions:
“Does that [strategy] mean you expect to make money with Queen-6-4?
“Also, I was playing a few weeks ago, and folded with Queen-3-2. The player on my right saw, and said, ‘Uh-oh. You should have played that. The dealer last night told me you should play Queen or better.’”
The answer to the first is that Queen-6-4 is not a money-making hand. It’s a hand you’ll win often enough that if you bet, you’ll lose less money overall than if you folded and forfeited the ante. Sometimes you’ll lose double, since you’ll lose just an ante and bet, but there will be enough ante-bet wins that the average loss will be less the cost of folding.
As for making the bet with Queen or better, regardless of the original two cards, that was a simplified strategy published by Lenny Frome. Frome knew full well that the most accurate strategy was more detailed than simply holding the Queen, but he wanted to give average players something that was easy to remember.
Queen or better is the dealer’s qualifying hand – with anything less, the dealer pays antes of players who stayed in the hand, but the bets are just returned to players. By giving players a strategy that basically mimics the dealer, Frome kept it as simple as can be.
Players who follow the bet-the-Queen strategy miss the mark by only a few low-cost hands. Hands you’d play at Queens or better but not at Queen-6-4 are Queen-6-3, Queen-6-2, Queen-5-4, Queen-5-3, Queen-5-2, Queen 4-3, Queen 4-2 and Queen-3-2.
You don’t give away much by betting all Queen-or-better hands, but the house edge uis lowest if you can remember to make the cutoff point Queen-6-4.