How to play
Lansquenet takes its name from the Landsknechte, the German mercenary foot soldiers of the 1500s, and it spread through Europe as a fast banking game. Nothing about it needs skill to play: two cards are turned, then the dealer keeps turning until one of them is matched. Here it’s dealt from a single 52-card deck that is reshuffled before every round.
- Place chips. Pick a chip from the tray (20, 100, 200 or 1,000) and tap one or more of the four betting spots: Player, Bank, Pair and Quick. Undo removes the last chip, Clear removes them all, and Rebet repeats the previous round’s bets.
- Deal. The first card is your card. The second is the bank card.
- Pair check. If the two cards have the same rank, say two sevens, the bank wins on the spot.
- The draw. Otherwise the dealer turns cards one at a time into the Draws row. The first card to match the rank of your card wins for the Player; the first to match the bank card wins for the Bank. Suits never matter.
A long round can run through many cards; the table keeps the last five in view and tells you how many were drawn in total. A small history strip shows how the last eight rounds ended, such as P3 (your card matched on the third draw), B1, or Pair.
Each bet is 20 to 1,000 credits in steps of 20, with at most 5,000 on the table per round.
The bets
| Bet | Wins when | Pays | Return |
|---|---|---|---|
| Player | your card is matched first | 1 to 1 | 94.12% |
| Bank | the bank card is matched first, or the first two cards pair | 0.8 to 1 | 95.29% |
| Pair | your card and the bank card share a rank | 15 to 1 | 94.12% |
| Quick | the very first draw matches either card | 7.5 to 1 | 96.00% |
Bets can be combined. Player and Pair together, for instance, cover the one way a Player bet loses before any card is drawn.
The odds
The whole game hangs on one fact: once the first two cards differ, each of their ranks has exactly three cards left in the remaining 50. Neither side has more “outs” than the other, so from that point it’s a coin flip which one is matched first.
That leaves the pair as the only source of the bank’s advantage. After your card is turned, 3 of the 51 remaining cards share its rank, so a pair turns up 3 times in 51 (about 5.9%). Every pair goes to the bank. Put together:
- Player wins 24 rounds in 51 (47.06%).
- Bank wins 27 rounds in 51 (52.94%), which is why it pays only 0.8 to 1.
- Quick needs the first two cards to differ (48 in 51) and then the first draw to hit one of the six matching cards among 50 (6 in 50). That’s about 11.3%, a little more than one round in nine.
Multiplying each chance by what the bet gives back (stake included) produces the return column above. Those figures are exact, not estimates.
Strategy
None of the bets can be pushed above its return, because every round starts from a freshly shuffled deck and nothing carries over. The useful choices are about which bet suits your pace.
- Quick is the best value on the table at 96%, but it misses close to nine rounds in ten. Expect long dry spells between hits.
- Bank is the next best and the steadiest: it wins more than half the time, at a smaller payout.
- Player and Pair share the worst return. Player is the natural “my card” bet, but the pairs it loses to cost it a little over a point compared with Bank.
- The history strip is just a record. A run of pairs or a string of long draws doesn’t change the next round, since the deck is reshuffled each time.
- Watch the table limit when combining. With several spots covered, the 5,000 cap per round comes into play sooner than you might think.
If you enjoy one-card banking games with old roots, Faro is another. Andar Bahar works on the same “first match wins” idea with a single card and two piles.
If you enjoy Lansquenet, try Lantern Dragon or Loose Deuces next.
