Learning to Dominate Caribbean Stud Poker

Even though Caribbean Stud is a simple game to learn, the strategy can actually get quite involved. In fact, whole books have been written about the topic, including one by this author. At its most advanced level, the best you’ll be able to lower the house edge on this game is 5.22%, making it far from one of the best games in the house. Advanced Caribbean Stud Strategy Once players have grasped the basics, it is time to move on to advanced Caribbean Stud strategies. If players understand this strategy well and implement it properly, they can convert Caribbean Stud Poker into a player friendly game. Raise on a hand comprising pairs or better. Since Caribbean Stud poker players are stripped of advantages like bluffing or card counting, their strategies revolve entirely around the moment in the game when they must decide whether to raise or to fold. Beginners can improve their odds with a very simple raise/fold strategy.

There are certain types of players who get into casino poker-style games because they enjoy the strategy and the simple fact that they can improve their payout rates depending on how skillful they are at the game in question. Even players who aren’t quite as serious along these lines still want to maximize their chances of winning, and learning strategy for the game in question is the best way to go about that.

Caribbean Stud Poker is a game that’s deceptively simple because a majority of the hands you play are really straightforward in terms of how to play them.

However, there’s still the small minority of hands that aren’t so easy to play. In fact, they can be downright complicated and tricky to the point that there’s probably no one alive who can consistently play 100 percent of hands perfectly 100 percent of the time.

That may sound daunting, but you can still learn to dominate the strategic side of the game by learning some advanced strategies and having an understanding of the thought process required to consistently put those strategies into practice.

A Quick Recap of How Caribbean Stud Works

Without getting into an unnecessary amount of detail, let’s prepare for looking at some advanced strategies by recapping how this game actually works.

Caribbean Stud Poker Strategy

• This game uses standard five-card poker hand rankings with the typical 52-card French deck with no jokers or wild cards.
• Players wager an ante bet.
• The player receives five cards face up, and the dealer receives five cards with only one of them face up.
• You have the option to fold and give up your cards and any chances of winning the hand. You also have the option to raise, which requires an additional bet (called the raise) worth twice the size of the ante.
• If the player raises, the dealer turns over his cards to see if he qualifies; qualifying requires at least AK-high.
• If the dealer does not qualify, the raise is returned as a push, and the ante wins at 1:1.
• If the dealer qualifies and wins, then the player loses the raise and ante.
• If the dealer qualifies, but the player wins, then the ante pays 1:1, and the raise pays according to a given pay table.
• If the dealer qualifies, but the player and dealer tie, then both the ante and raise are a push.

From a procedural standpoint, this game isn’t that complicated and is certainly no more complicated than the majority of other titles in the genre.

However, the strategy aspect of Caribbean Stud Poker is more interesting than most because you get to see a part of the dealer’s hand as an additional piece of information. Leveraging this extra piece of information is the key to advanced Caribbean Stud strategy.

The Problem With How Caribbean Stud Strategy is Commonly Taught

One of the problems with advanced strategy in Caribbean Stud Poker online is that most hands are actually really easy to play. This is because of how there are a small number of hands, relatively speaking, that have a tremendous degree of strategic depth while the rest generally do not as long as you really understand how five-card poker rankings work with respect to high cards.

With that said, here are the two fundamental rules of basic strategy in this game:

1. Raising – You will always raise if you have a made hand of any kind that’s a pair or above.
2. Folding – You will always fold if you have ace-queen high or lower.

The problem is that this leaves out all of the ace-king high hands. This is such an issue for players who really want to learn advanced strategy in this game because it leaves out the hands that you actually need better strategies for and an understanding of how and why the game works the way it does to know how to play.

Those are exactly the things that we’re going to give you here by looking at three instructive hand examples and giving you an understanding of why these hands need to be played in a certain way with specific principles being highlighted.

In the following hands, assume that the player never has a flush for the sake of simplicity. It’s the ranks of the cards that matter for these examples and not the suits.

Hand 1: Player has AKJ82, Dealer shows 8

As you can see from the above two guidelines, all hands that are not AK-high for the player are straightforward for the most part, at least in terms of general guidelines. However, for the smaller percentage of hands that do involve ace-king high, which isn’t a trivially small number, the strategic depth is very serious.

To put it as straightforward as we can: You will increase or decrease your house advantage in this game based purely on how you play these specific hands.

What makes these types of hands so difficult is that you have little information to go on to make your decision, and that makes them marginal from an information standpoint. However, the real tricky part is that they aren’t marginal in terms of how much value you lose if you make a mistake. That’s why they’re so important to learn to play well.

In this first instructive example, we learn about a critical concept called blockers. In poker and poker-style games, a blocker is when a card is held that another player would have liked to have available to use to make a hand.

If we look at the dealer’s up card, we see that it’s an 8. We also hold an 8 in our hand. That means that we have a blocker to the dealer being able to make a pair with that one card. This leads us to our first rule of advanced strategy when playing AK-high hands in Caribbean Stud:

Rule 1: If the dealer is showing a card that’s a queen or lower, and we hold a blocker to that card for the dealer to be able to make a pair, then we raise.

Holding blockers in this way is the very first thing we will look for when we find ourselves in this type of situation, but we’re going to repeat something to make it clear: This is only for when the dealer is showing a queen or lower. If the dealer is showing an ace or a king, then we will decide how to play based on the next rule.

Hand 2: Player has AKJ74, Dealer shows K

Blockers apply differently when it’s an ace or a king that the dealer is showing. While we do have the advantage of making it harder for the dealer to make a pair, we also run the disadvantage of the dealer having the opportunity to have a better AK-high hand than us.

Caribbean Stud Poker Rules Strategy

Along these lines, playing hands where we have a blocker to a dealer’s ace or king comes down to the high card value of the rest of our hand. If we have better chances of beating the dealer the few times he also has AK-high, which is done by having higher kickers in the remaining three cards of our respective hands, then we maintain our advantage and can raise accordingly.

That leads us to our next rule of advanced Caribbean Stud strategy:

Rule 2: If the dealer shows an ace or king, then we raise if we also have a queen or a jack.

The idea is that our blocker to the dealer having a pair is tempered by the ability for the dealer to have AK-high. We need to make sure we have the edge in those scenarios before we raise, and we do so by having a high kicker with a queen or jack.

Hand 3: Player has AKQ94, Dealer shows 8

In the first two examples, and the resulting first two rules about playing AK-high hands, we looked at what to do in the two cases where where have a blocker to one of the dealer’s cards. In this last example, we’re going to look at how to play scenarios where the dealer’s card does not match any of our own.

There are two ways that the dealer can beat us in general other than making a big made hand that we cannot yet see because we can only see one of his cards:

1. Making a pair
2. Having a better AK-high

Since we do not have a blocker, we cannot inhibit his ability to make pairs. That means we’ll need to rely completely on chances of making a better AK-high hand. That leads us to the following third and final rule:

Rule 3: If the dealer’s card matches none of our own, then we only raise if we have at least four cards of higher rank than the dealer’s card.

The idea here is that if we have four cards higher than the dealer’s up card, then we are in a good position to have strong chances of having a better AK-high the times that it becomes relevant. That’s actually the deciding factor here since we can’t block pairs, so it’s easy to see how this rule works.

Putting It All Together

If you follow all three rules of the advanced strategy for Caribbean Stud that we have broken down in the above sections, then you’ll play in a way that’s only giving up a 0.001 percent edge to the casino compared to if you were playing absolutely mathematically perfect.

That’s basically a rounding error in the grand scheme of things, so it’s hard to imagine doing much better than what we have laid out for you here. We’ve went into an appropriate amount of depth here to get you super close to playing perfectly, and that’s really the best that you can ask for.

Rules & Strategy

Caribbean StudPoker

A popular spin-off of poker developed for traditional casinos more than a decade ago, Caribbean Stud has taken a front-row-seat in casinos, owing its success both to the drastic rise in poker popularity and to its overwhelming simplicity. The basic rules for the game are as follows:

• All players must make an ante wager according to the limits of the table. An optional $1 progressive wager is also made at this time.
• The dealer and all players are dealt five cards. All player cards are dealt face down. The dealer receives four cards face down. The fifth card is exposed.
• After looking at the hand, players must decide whether to fold or bet. Hands values are based according to traditional poker rules. Players may not share information about their hands.
• Any player that folds forfeits the current wager.
• Any player that bets must wager an additional amount equal to twice (2x) the value of the ante.
• After all players have made and acted on their decisions, the dealer will expose his remaining cards.
• The dealer must have a minimum hand of Ace/King to qualify. If the dealer does not qualify, players will win even money on their ante and push with their bet.
• If the dealer’s hand does qualify and loses to the player, then the ante will pay even money and the bet will pay according to the table’s payout schedule.

Common Caribbean Stud Pay Table (US)
Hand / Pays
Royal flush / 100 to 1
Straight flush / 50 to 1
Four of a kind / 20 to 1
Full house / 7 to 1
Flush / 5 to 1
Straight / 4 to 1
Three of a kind / 3 to 1
Two pair / 2 to 1
All other / 1 to 1

• If the dealer qualifies and wins, the player losses all monies wagered.
• The optional progressive side bet will be based entirely on the standard poker value of the player’s hand.

While the mechanics of the game are clearly easy to follow, optimal strategy for this game can get a little complicated. Unfortunately, providing a detailed strategy for each falls a little outside the scope of this book. However, at its most basic, the call strategy for this game involves two actions: always bet when dealt a pair, and Always fold with any hand below an Ace/King.

Finally, following optimal strategy, the best you can do with this game in terms of reducing the vigorish is about 5.2%.

Variations on a theme

Caribbean Stud is another game that has suffered few changes in overall structure after entering the online environment. In fact, the two biggest changes involve its name—which varies according to software provider–and the payout structure for both the bet and progressive jackpot. Alternative names include: Caribbean Poker, Island Progressive Stud Poker, and Cyberstud Poker.

Pay Table I
Payout structure variations for called hands
Hand / Pays
Royal Flush / 100-1
Straight Flush / 50-1
Four of a Kind / 20-1
Full House / 9-1
Flush / 7-1
Straight / 4-1
Three of a Kind / 3-1
Two Pair / 2-1
Pair or Less / 1-1

Pay Table II
Hand / Pays
Royal Flush / 200-1
Straight Flush / 50-1
Four of a Kind / 20-1
Full House / 7-1
Flush / 5-1
Straight / 4-1
Three of a Kind / 3-1
Two Pair / 2-1
Pair or Less / 1-1

Pay Table III
Hand / Pays
Royal Flush / 800-1
Straight Flush / 200-1
Four of a Kind / 25-1
Full House / 10-1
Flush / 7-1
Straight / 5-1
Three of a Kind / 3-1
Two Pair / 2-1
Pair or Less / 1-1

The pay structures for the optional progressive jackpot wager include:

Progressive Payout Variations
Hand Payout
Table 1 / Table 2 / Table3 / Table4
Royal Flush / 100% / 100% / 100% / 100%
Straight Flush / 10% / 10% / 10% / 10%
Four of a Kind / $500 / $500 / $150 / $100
Full House / $250 / $150 / $100 / $75
Flush / $100 / $75 / $50 / $50
Straight or Lower / $0 / $0 / $0 / $0

Caribbean Stud Poker Strategy

As you can see, there are some drastic variations for payout tables from site to site, so if Caribbean Stud Poker is your game, be sure to verify the pay schedules from each casino you visit. If given the opportunity when narrowing down your search, opt for the site that offers the best possible schedule.

Winning at Caribbean Stud

Even though Caribbean Stud is a simple game to learn, the strategy can actually get quite involved. In fact, whole books have been written about the topic, including one by this author.

At its most advanced level, the best you’ll be able to lower the house edge on this game is 5.22%, making it far from one of the best games in the house. A simplified, yet not overly costly strategy—hovering with a vigorish of about 5.5%–involves two actions. First, always bet/raise when your hand contains a pair (no matter how small) or better. Second, fold any hands that do not contain at least the minimum qualifying hand for the dealer: Ace-King.

Slightly more advanced strategy involves paying close attention to the dealer’s upcard. For example, if you hold an Ace-King in your hand and the dealer’s exposed card is below a king and matches one of your other cards, you should bet. Other factors that you should keep an eye out for include the remaining cards in your Ace-King hand (do you have a queen as well, while the dealer shows garbage?) and the comparative rank of the dealer’s card to your remaining cards.

While it’s usually suggested that player’s learn and master the optimal strategy for any game they play, in this particular instance beginners may want to avoid the hours of tedious study needed to drop the edge such a small amount in an otherwise expensive game, and concentrate solely on these basics. If you find that you have a real taste for the game, then invest the time to drop that edge down to its optimal level.

Caribbean Stud Card Game

Rules & Strategy – Caribbean Stud Poker

Rules & Strategy Caribbean Stud Poker A popular spin-off of poker developed for traditional casinos more than a decade ago, Caribbean Stud has taken a front-row-seat in casinos, owing its …