How to play
Card Derby turns a single card each into a match between two sides, Home and Away. There’s no drawing, no decision after the deal and no dealer hand to beat. You pick a side (or the tie) and two cards settle it.
- Choose a chip from the tray: 20, 100, 200 or 1,000.
- Tap Home, Away or Draw to place it. Tap again to stack more. You can spread chips across all three spots in the same match.
- Press Deal. Home’s card is turned first, then Away’s.
The higher rank wins. Aces are top, then King, Queen, Jack, 10 and down to 2. Suits never matter, so the 7 of hearts and the 7 of clubs are equal, and that’s a draw.
Undo takes back your last chip, Clear removes them all, and Rebet puts back the bets from the previous match. A strip above the board keeps the last twelve results.
Payouts
| Bet | Wins when | Pays | On a draw |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home | Home’s card is higher | 1 to 1 | half your bet back |
| Away | Away’s card is higher | 1 to 1 | half your bet back |
| Draw | both cards share a rank | 12 to 1 | — |
The half-back rule is what sets this table apart from a plain high-card game. In Casino War, a tie leads to a choice to surrender or go to war; here a tie simply costs a Home or Away bet half its stake and the match is over. That’s also why bets go in steps of 20: half of any bet has to be a whole number of credits. Each spot takes 20 to 1,000, and the table as a whole caps at 5,000 per deal.
The odds
The cards come from an eight-deck shoe of 416 cards, reshuffled before every match. Once Home’s card is out, 415 cards are left and 31 of them share its rank. Everything follows from that one fraction.
- Draw: 31 in 415, about 7.47%, or 1 match in 13.4. A fair payout would be about 12.4 to 1, so 12 to 1 is close. Return: 97.11%.
- Home or Away: each wins 46.27% of the time. Add the half refund on draws and the return is 96.27%, a house edge of 3.73%.
Those numbers are exact, counted over every possible pair from the shoe. Home and Away are perfectly symmetric; the order the cards are turned changes nothing.
A single deck would make draws rarer (3 in 51, about 5.9%), which is why the shoe matters for the Draw bet. With eight decks, removing Home’s card barely changes the chance of matching it.
Strategy
There’s nothing to decide once the cards are dealt, so strategy comes down to which spot you back and how much.
Draw is the best-returning bet on the table. It loses 2.89 credits per 100 over time, against 3.73 for Home or Away. The trade-off is volatility: you’ll lose about 12 matches out of 13, and the wins come in big lumps.
Backing Home and Away together doesn’t hedge anything. One wins and one loses, so you break even, except on a draw, where you lose half of both. It’s the same edge as either bet alone, just with twice the money at risk. Adding a Draw chip on top only mixes in the Draw bet’s own odds.
Results don’t run in streaks. The shoe is full and freshly shuffled every time, so the history strip is for interest only. Five Home wins in a row says nothing about the sixth match.
If you like single-card showdowns, Dragon Tiger is the closest relative, with a different tie rule and a Suited Tie bet.
If you enjoy Card Derby, try Card Roulette or Card Swap 21 next.
