Why this one can be computed and the main game had to be solved
The Ante/Play bet needed 407 million evaluations to solve, because your hand is played against a dealer hand and the two interact. The 6 Card Bonus does not interact with anything. It looks at all six cards on the table, takes the best five-card hand among them, and pays on that alone. The dealer's cards are ingredients rather than opposition.
So it reduces to one question with a finite answer: how often do six cards make each kind of hand? That is 20,358,520 combinations, and the table below is all of them.
The exact six-card distribution
| Hand | Bonus pays | Hands in 20,358,520 | Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Royal flush | 1,000 to 1 | 188 | 0.000923% |
| Straight flush | 200 to 1 | 1,656 | 0.008134% |
| Four of a kind | 100 to 1 | 14,664 | 0.072029% |
| Full house | 20 to 1 | 165,984 | 0.815305% |
| Flush | 15 to 1 | 205,792 | 1.010840% |
| Straight | 10 to 1 | 361,620 | 1.776259% |
| Three of a kind | 7 to 1 | 732,160 | 3.596332% |
| Two pair or less | loses | 18,876,456 | 92.720178% |
What the numbers say
It pays on 7.28% of hands. Three of a kind or better and nothing else. Just under half of all six-card hands are a single pair, at 47.80%, and a pair is worth nothing on this bet no matter how high it is.
The 1,000 on the sign is decoration. There are 188 six-card hands containing a royal flush, which is one in 108,290. At 1000 to 1 that line contributes 1.1% of everything the bet returns. The same pattern turned up on the Trips bet at 0.2% and on keno at 14.94%: the largest number printed on the felt is doing advertising, not arithmetic.
It is expensive, but not the worst thing on the floor. At 8.5614% it costs more than twice the Ante/Play bet beside it and more than sixteen times blackjack at 0.5153%. It is still cheaper than 56 of the bets in our ranked table, including every craps hardway and most of the sic bo layout.
If your table pays differently
Every figure here describes the schedule shown. Six Card Bonus pay tables vary, and the lines that usually move are the flush and the straight, which between them are 2.79% of all hands. A schedule paying less on those is materially worse than this one, and the difference will not be advertised. Read the felt.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is the house edge on the 6 Card Bonus?
- 8.5614% on the widely published 1000-200-100-20-15-10-7 schedule, computed here from all 20,358,520 six-card hands.
- Does the 6 Card Bonus depend on beating the dealer?
- No. It pays on the best five-card hand made from all six cards on the table, whatever the dealer holds and whether or not you win the main bet. That independence is why it can be computed exactly.
- How often does it pay?
- On 7.49% of hands, three of a kind or better. Just under half of all hands are a single pair, which pays nothing here.
- Is it worth playing?
- It costs more than sixteen times what blackjack costs at 0.5153% and more than twice the Ante/Play bet it sits beside at 3.3730%. It is among the more expensive bets this site prices.
Figures come from six_card_math.py,
which enumerates all 20,358,520 six-card hands. Its verification is worth
describing, because the first version got it backwards: it checked the
computed counts against a frequency table typed from memory, and the
remembered table was wrong in two of nine places while the engine was
right. It now checks that the nine categories account for every hand in
the deck, and checks the two counts that can be derived on paper against
their formulas rather than against a stored number. Last computed
September 2026.