Caribbean Stud is a losing game
Posted in Commentary on January 4th, 2004 by Sacha PeterI was having a discussion with a friend one day and he claimed that he liked sitting between two players at a Caribbean Stud table because he could see their cards and thus use that information to make “winning decisions” at a casino game. Despite the fact that you are not supposed to share information with other players around the table, peeking is frequently done and is tolerated by the casinos because there is still not enough information available to make winning decisions. I explained this to my friend and also explained that the only way that he could win at Caribbean Stud was to collude with all seven people around the table. My friend still adamantly claimed that he was a ‘winning player’ at Caribbean Stud and over several sessions that he was ahead. I called “bullshit” on this and left it at that – there was no amount of arguing or presentation of proof that could be done in that situation to show how full of it he was.
Here I will present evidence to back my claims. Or rather, most of the work has been done for me by the Wizard of Odds, who is a mathematical consultant for casino games and has other credentials in the gaming industry. Specifically, his article on the Analysis of Caribbean Stud provides ample evidence for me to back my claims up. Since I don’t want the reader to wade through pages of information, I will summarize it.
You have to put down an initial bet. Let’s say this is $10. You are dealt five cards and the dealer is dealt five cards. The dealer has one card that is face up. You have two choices. Either you can fold and the dealer will take your $10. Or you can raise, which means you put another $20 in front of you and then you compare hands. You cannot raise any more or any less money.
If the dealer does not have at least an ace and king in his hand (or something better like a pair, two pair, etc.) then you get the $20 that you raised plus you get 1:1 on the original $10 that you placed. In other words, you will end up with a profit of $10 for that hand. If the dealer does have an ace and king in his hand (or better) then the player with the higher poker hand wins. If the dealer has the higher poker hand, he gets the $30 you placed on the table (i.e. you lose your original $10 and $20 raise). If you have the better hand, you get 1:1 on your original $10 bet, and your $20 raise back, plus an increasing amount of money depending on what hand you had. It amounts to a profit of $30 if you had a pair, $50 if you had two pair, $70 if you had a three of a kind, $90 for a straight, $110 for a flush, $150 for a full house and more for hands that you and I will never see in our lifetimes.
The table underneath the “Strategy” section tells you how much money you will lose in the game.
If you bet $10 in a hand, you will lose 52.24 cents per hand on average assuming you play perfectly. Now as I explained above, you have the option of putting more money on the table (i.e. raising in a game) and if you play perfectly, you will lose 76.65 cents per hand in a game where you originally bet $10. This is what the Wizard of Odds calls the “element of risk” in that you are actually risking $30, but your expected loss in a percentage form is less.
So let’s assume that you play 100 games, at $10 a piece. You will typically walk out of the casino with $52.24 less in your pocket at the end of the day.
Now, it was mentioned by my friend that he said that he can increase his chances of winning by looking at the cards of the player to his left and the right. If you look at the very bottom of the article under “Player Collusion”, you see the following:
According to the paper ‘An Analysis of Caribbean Stud Poker’ by Peter Griffin and John M. Gwynn Jr., which appears in the book Finding the Edge in the perfect situation of having 7 colluding players it would be possible to narrow down the dealer’s unseen cards to just 16. Using a computer to analyze all 1820 possible 4-card sets out of 16 the player would have an advantage of 2.3%. In a six player game the house would still have an edge of 0.4%.
In other words, if you were able to look at all 7 hands around the table and use perfect analysis, you could walk away with 23 cents per $10 bet. However, if you could only take a look at six players around the table, you will lose an average of 4 cents per $10 bet. The conclusion here is that if you look at less than seven players’ hands around the table (which is illegal, but assuming you can pull it off anyway) you will lose money, on average, playing Caribbean Stud. Thus, my friend’s claim of being able to beat the game by just looking at the hands of the players to his left and right is complete garbage.