Four Card Poker

How to Play

You get 5 cards. The dealer gets 6. You both pick your best 4-card hand. Sounds unfair? It is balanced by your ability to raise up to 3x your Ante on strong hands, or fold and cut your losses on weak ones. The dealer always qualifies and always plays — no ducking the showdown. Every hand goes to a head-to-head comparison unless you choose to fold.

After seeing your 5 cards, decide: fold (lose the Ante), call (match the Ante), or raise (2x or 3x). The beauty of getting 5 cards is the selection — you get to discard the weakest card and play your best four. That extra card gives you more chances to form strong combinations: pairs become more likely, and you might find a flush or straight hiding in those five cards that you would miss with just four.

Two side bets add extra dimensions. Aces Up pays on your hand alone — any pair of Aces or better wins, and it goes up to 50:1 for Four of a Kind. The Ante Bonus automatically kicks in on Three of a Kind or better at no extra cost. Between the main hand, both side bets, and Millionaire Mode, every deal carries four independent ways to win. And since the dealer always qualifies, strong hands always get properly rewarded — there is no frustrating push when the dealer cannot even play.

Hand Rankings & Strategy

Four-card poker rankings have some surprises. Four of a Kind is the top hand, followed by Straight Flush, Three of a Kind, Flush, Straight, Two Pair, Pair, and High Card. In four-card poker, Four of a Kind outranks Straight Flush — the opposite of five-card poker. With only four cards, the probability math shifts: getting four cards of the same rank is harder than completing a four-card suited straight.

The basic strategy is straightforward: raise 3x with a pair of Aces or better, call (1x) with any other pair, and fold with less than a pair. Strong kicker cards like Ace-King-Queen can make a borderline case for calling instead of folding, but the pair threshold is the main decision point. Since the dealer always qualifies with their best four from six cards, you are always going to showdown — which means strong hands get rewarded consistently and folding weak hands saves you the Play bet.

Side Bets

Provably Fair

All 11 cards are locked by SHA-256 before you bet. You can verify any hand after the round. The dealer's extra card is not picked from thin air — it is part of the same committed seed that determines your cards. The server cannot give the dealer better cards based on your bet size or side bet selections.

The verification is simple: before the hand, the server shows you a hash of its random seed. After the hand, the raw seed is revealed. Hash it yourself, compare to the pre-deal hash, and confirm the match. Your client seed adds randomness the server cannot predict. A nonce increments each round so the same seeds never produce the same deal. The main hand, Aces Up, Ante Bonus, and Millionaire Mode all derive from one verified seed. Check any hand from the game history any time you want.

Frequently Asked Questions