How to play
Thirteen Card Poker is played against the dealer with one 52-card deck. You and the dealer each get 13 cards and arrange them into three poker hands:
- Front: 3 cards
- Middle: 5 cards
- Back: 5 cards
Your Back hand must be at least as strong as your Middle, and your Middle at least as strong as your Front. The Play button stays off until your arrangement follows this rule.
- Place a bet and press Deal. You need twice the bet in credits, because losing all three hands costs double.
- Arrange your cards: tap one card, then another, and the two swap places. Arrange for me sorts them the way the dealer would.
- Press Play. The dealer’s cards are turned over, already arranged by the house way.
- Each of your hands is compared with the dealer’s hand in the same row. Ties go to the dealer.
| Hands you win | Result |
|---|---|
| All three | Bet pays 2:1 |
| Two | Bet pays 1:1 |
| One | You lose the bet |
| None | You lose twice the bet |
Hand ranks. The five-card hands use the usual poker order: straight flush, four of a kind, full house, flush, straight, three of a kind, two pair, pair, high card. Ace-2-3-4-5 is the lowest straight. The three-card Front hand only counts three of a kind, a pair or high card: straights and flushes don’t count there.
Arranging tips
- Arrange for me is a good start. It checks all 72,072 ways to split 13 cards into Front, Middle and Back, and among the legal ones picks the one with the best chance of winning each row against the kind of hands the dealer usually makes.
- The Front hand is easy to win with a pair, because the dealer’s Front is often just high cards. Moving a pair to the Front can be worth weakening the Middle.
- Don’t pour everything into the Back. A huge Back hand wins only one row, the same as a modest one.
- Watch for hidden straights and flushes across all 13 cards: a flush in the Back can free up pairs for the Middle and Front.
The house edge
Both you and the dealer play the same kind of hand, so the game would be even without one rule: ties go to the dealer. That is the whole house edge. In our simulation of 12,000 deals, each played twice with the hands swapped between you and the dealer, a player who uses Arrange for me every time loses about 0.6% of the bet per hand on average (give or take about 0.15%).
If you enjoy Thirteen Card Poker, try Thirty-Two Cards or Three Card Baccarat next.
