How to play
Five dice are rolled together, and their faces are read as a poker hand. Your job is to guess which hand it will be before they land. There are no rerolls and no dice to hold, unlike the old pub game of the same name: one roll, one hand, and the table pays the bets that called it.
- Choose a chip and tap one or more hands on the betting board. Each spot takes 10 to 1,000 credits in steps of 10, with up to 5,000 on the table per roll.
- Tap Roll. The dice tumble, settle, and the hand is named.
- Only the exact hand pays. A roll of 2-2-2-5-5 is a full house and nothing else. It doesn’t count as three of a kind or as a pair for betting purposes.
Undo removes your last chip, Clear empties the board, and Rebet repeats the previous roll’s bets.
The eight hands
Every roll is exactly one of these, so the eight spots together cover every possible result.
| Hand | Example | Pays |
|---|---|---|
| Five of a kind | 4-4-4-4-4 | 1250 to 1 |
| Four of a kind | 6-6-6-6-2 | 49 to 1 |
| Full house | 2-2-2-5-5 | 24 to 1 |
| Straight | 1-2-3-4-5 or 2-3-4-5-6 | 30 to 1 |
| Three of a kind | 3-3-3-1-6 | 5.3 to 1 |
| Two pair | 1-1-4-4-5 | 3.2 to 1 |
| One pair | 6-6-1-3-5 | 1.1 to 1 |
| Nothing | 1-2-4-5-6 | 14.6 to 1 |
There are only two straights. Since a die has six faces, five different faces always leave one face out, and the roll is a straight only when the missing face is 6 or 1. Leave out a 2, 3, 4 or 5 and you get “Nothing”.
The decimal payouts always come out to whole credits, because every bet is a multiple of 10. Three of a kind on a 10-credit bet pays 53.
The odds
Five dice can land 7,776 ways, all equally likely. We counted each one:
| Hand | Ways | Chance | House edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Five of a kind | 6 | 0.08% | 3.47% |
| Four of a kind | 150 | 1.93% | 3.55% |
| Full house | 300 | 3.86% | 3.55% |
| Straight | 240 | 3.09% | 4.32% |
| Three of a kind | 1,200 | 15.43% | 2.78% |
| Two pair | 1,800 | 23.15% | 2.78% |
| One pair | 3,600 | 46.30% | 2.78% |
| Nothing | 480 | 6.17% | 3.70% |
Two things surprise card players. A straight is rarer than a full house, which is why it pays more. And “Nothing” is harder to roll than three of a kind: five different faces only happen 720 times in 7,776, and a third of those are straights.
Strategy
Every bet loses a fixed share over time, and nothing in the rolling changes that. What you choose is the mix of risk and return.
The cheapest bets are the common hands. Three of a kind, two pair and one pair all carry the same 2.78% edge, the lowest on the board. One pair wins almost half the time but pays only 1.1 to 1, so it’s the slow, steady option.
The straight is the most expensive. At 4.32% it gives up the most per roll, even though 30 to 1 looks generous.
Covering several hands doesn’t create an edge. Because the hands never overlap, betting on all eight guarantees exactly one winner every roll. With equal chips on every spot, you’d lose about 2.7% of the total staked, which is just the average of the eight edges. Spreading chips only smooths out how often you see a payout.
Five of a kind is a lottery ticket. About 1 roll in 1,300, for 1,250 to 1.
If you’d rather play a poker hand against someone else’s dice, Klondike Dice puts your five dice against the house’s. For three dice and a much bigger board, try Sic Bo.
If you enjoy Poker Dice, try Pontoon or Pot-Limit Omaha next.
