Discount Gambling

I’ve been playing a lot of Six Card Poker at my local Viejas Casino, which gave me the chance to think about a better collusion strategy. When I first posted about this game, I was disappointed that the theoretical limit for collusion would yield only around +1.2% on the Ante bet. So I didn’t try too hard to make a good collusion strategy.

But it’s a pretty fun game, since the dealer shows half his hand, and with a full table, you’ll know 39 of the 52 cards. You can get the rules of the game from the WoOs.

After thinking it through, I boiled down the 6-way collusion strategy to the following three rules:

• fold any hand already beat by dealer
• fold any qualifying hand when there are 4 or more remaining single-card outs that beat you
• fold any non-qualifying hand when a kicker out remains that beats you, or there are 3 or more remaining pair outs for the dealer

This collusion strategy simulates at +0.43%, which isn’t bad. It’s pretty easy to count remaining dealer outs among the confederates. People just have to chime-in on how many copies of the dealer cards they have. The strategy is extremely simple, and the variance is pretty low given the 1x call, and the help in folding -EV hands.