How to play
Trente et Quarante, French for “thirty and forty”, has been dealt in European casinos since the 1600s and is still found in Monte Carlo. Players often call it Rouge et Noir. It’s a pure betting game: once your chips are down, the cards decide everything and you never make another choice.
Cards come from a six-deck shoe. Aces count 1, the 2 to 10 count their face value, and every Jack, Queen and King counts 10. Suits matter only for one thing, the colour of the very first card.
A round:
- Pick a chip (20, 100 or 500) and tap any of the four betting spots: Noir, Rouge, Couleur, Inverse. Each spot takes 20 to 1,000, in multiples of 20.
- Press Deal. The dealer turns cards onto the Noir row, one at a time, until the row’s total passes 30. Every row therefore stops somewhere from 31 to 40.
- The Rouge row is then dealt the same way.
- The row whose total is lower, that is closer to 31, wins.
Clear removes your chips before the deal and Rebet repeats your previous bets. A strip of recent results (N, R or = for a tie) runs along the top. The shoe is replaced with a freshly shuffled one when it gets low.
Since three picture cards make only 30, a row always needs at least four cards. Long rows of small cards are where the game gets its suspense.
The four bets
Every bet pays 1 to 1.
| Bet | Wins when |
|---|---|
| Noir | the Noir row (dealt first) has the lower total |
| Rouge | the Rouge row (dealt second) has the lower total |
| Couleur | the first card of the Noir row matches the winning row’s colour |
| Inverse | the first card doesn’t match the winning row’s colour |
Couleur takes a moment to get used to. Suppose the first card dealt is the 7 of hearts, a red card. If the Rouge row then wins, colour and winner agree: Couleur wins. If Noir wins instead, Inverse wins. A black first card works the other way round.
Ties. If both rows stop on the same total, bets are simply returned, with one exception. When both rows make exactly 31, you lose half of each bet and get the other half back. That’s why bets come in steps of 20: the half is always a whole number.
The odds
Without the 31-31 rule, this would be a perfect coin flip. Noir and Rouge are dealt by identical rules, so neither has an edge, and the colour of the first card is independent of which row wins.
The 31-31 tie is the house’s only advantage, and it hits every bet the same way. Thirty-one is the single most likely row total, reached roughly 14.8% of the time, so both rows land on it in about 2.2% of deals. Losing half your stake on those deals works out to a house edge of about 1.1% on each of the four bets. (Those figures come from exact row totals for an endless deck, checked against 200,000 deals of the six-deck shoe.)
That makes it one of the cheaper games in a casino lobby: well below a single-zero roulette wheel’s 2.70%, and close to the best bets at Baccarat.
Strategy
There’s no decision after the bet, so strategy is limited to what you put down and how much.
All four bets cost the same. Couleur and Inverse feel more exotic, but they carry the same 1.1% edge as Rouge and Noir. Choose whichever you enjoy following.
Don’t cover both sides. Rouge plus Noir, or Couleur plus Inverse, wins one and loses the other on almost every deal. On a 31-31 tie both lose half. You’d be paying the edge twice to stand still.
Mixing pairs is different. Rouge plus Couleur can win both, lose both, or split, depending on the first card. It doesn’t change the expected cost, only how your results swing.
The result strip is history only. Six decks reshuffled when low leave no useful pattern. A run of Rouge wins says nothing about the next deal.
Watch the bankroll, not the cards. With an edge this small, credits last a long time at a steady bet. Big swings come from raising stakes, not from the game.
If you enjoy Trente et Quarante, try Triple Double Bonus or 2-7 Triple Draw next.
