How often does the dealer qualify in Caribbean Stud?

On 56.32% of hands, exactly 205/364, counted across all 2,598,960 five-card hands. The dealer needs ace-king or better; 1,296,420 of hands are a pair or better and a further 167,280 are ace-king high.

What happens when the dealer does not qualify?

Your ante pays even money and your raise, which is twice the ante, is returned unused however strong your hand is. That happens on 43.68% of hands.

What is the house edge on Caribbean Stud?

This site does not state one. An exact figure needs every player hand priced against every dealer hand that can follow it, about four trillion comparisons, and we do not restate other people's analyses as our own.

Is the Caribbean Stud progressive worth playing?

Only above a jackpot of about $263,205 on the common schedule, where the bet returns its stake. Below that it loses, and it pays nothing at all on 99.63% of hands: a flush or better arrives about once in 273 deals.

Caribbean Stud: The Two Figures That Can Be Counted

The dealer qualifies on exactly 205/364 of hands, 56.32%. Ace-king or better, counted across all 2,598,960 five-card hands: 1,296,420 of them are a pair or better and a further 167,280 are ace-king high with no pair. The rest of the time, 43.68%, the dealer folds, your ante pays even money and your raise is returned however strong your hand was. That last clause is the whole shape of the game.

How the game runs

You post an ante and receive five cards. The dealer receives five, one of them face up. You then either fold, losing the ante, or place a raise of twice the ante and go to showdown. There is no drawing and no second decision.

If the dealer does not hold ace-king or better, the dealer does not qualify: the ante pays 1 to 1 and the raise, the larger of your two bets, simply comes back. If the dealer qualifies and you win, the ante pays 1 to 1 and the raise pays on a scale that runs from 1 to 1 for a pair up to 100 to 1 for a royal flush.

The qualification rate, counted

The dealer's hand is five cards and nothing else, so how often it qualifies is a count rather than a simulation. Over every one of the 2,598,960 five-card hands:

Dealer holds	Hands	Share	Qualifies
A pair or better	1,296,420	49.88%	yes
Ace-king high, no pair	167,280	6.44%	yes
Anything else	1,135,260	43.68%	no

So the dealer folds on 43.68% of hands, close to three in seven. This is the number that makes Caribbean Stud feel strange: on those hands your two-unit raise is dead money that comes back unused, and it is why the raise decision cannot be read as a normal bet against a normal opponent.

Why this page claims no house edge

Every other table game here carries a figure computed from the cards. Caribbean Stud does not, and the reason is arithmetic rather than reluctance. An exact edge means pricing the raise-or-fold decision for every player hand against every dealer hand that can follow it: 2,598,960 player hands, each against 1,533,939 possible dealer hands. That is about four trillion comparisons, a different class of computation from the 407 million behind Three Card Poker, and this site does not run it. Published figures of roughly 5.2% of the ante come from analyses we did not perform, so they are not restated here as though they were ours.

The same rule applies on Ultimate Texas Hold'em, for the same reason, and on pai gow poker, for a different one.

The progressive, and why its cost is not a number

The dollar side bet is the part of the table that can be priced, and the answer is unusual: it does not have a fixed cost. The lower rungs pay fixed amounts and the top two pay a share of the meter, so what the bet is worth depends on a number displayed on the sign.

Hand	Typical payout	Hands in 2,598,960	One in
Royal flush	the whole meter	4	649,740
Straight flush	10% of the meter	36	72,193
Four of a kind	$100	624	4,165
Full house	$75	3,744	694
Flush	$50	5,108	509

Two things follow. First, the bet returns nothing at all on 99.63% of hands: a flush or better arrives about once in 273 deals, and everything below it loses the dollar. Second, the fixed rungs alone return 23.03% of the stake, so the meter has to carry the rest.

Break-even is a jackpot of $263,205. On the schedule above, a one-dollar progressive bet returns exactly its stake when the meter reaches that figure, and it is a losing bet below it. Most signs never get there.

That is the same lesson as the jackpot line across four pay tables: the biggest number on the felt is doing the advertising, and the small fixed rungs do most of the actual returning. Houses differ, so read the amounts on your own table and put them through the same arithmetic; the frequencies in the third column are fixed by the deck and will not change.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often does the dealer qualify in Caribbean Stud?: On 56.32% of hands, exactly 205/364, counted across all 2,598,960 five-card hands. The dealer needs ace-king or better; 1,296,420 of hands are a pair or better and a further 167,280 are ace-king high.
What happens when the dealer does not qualify?: Your ante pays even money and your raise, which is twice the ante, is returned unused however strong your hand is. That happens on 43.68% of hands.
What is the house edge on Caribbean Stud?: This site does not state one. An exact figure needs every player hand priced against every dealer hand that can follow it, about four trillion comparisons, and we do not restate other people's analyses as our own.
Is the Caribbean Stud progressive worth playing?: Only above a jackpot of about $263,205 on the common schedule, where the bet returns its stake. Below that it loses, and it pays nothing at all on 99.63% of hands: a flush or better arrives about once in 273 deals.

The qualification rate and the rung frequencies are produced by caribbean_math.py, which enumerates all 2,598,960 five-card hands, checks its nine category counts against the published five-card frequencies, checks that the three qualification buckets add back to C(52,5), and refuses to write a cache that fails any of those. The break-even jackpot is exact rational arithmetic over those counts on the schedule shown. No house edge is stated for the main bet. Last computed September 2026.