About This Site

What this is

A place to learn Mississippi Stud and practise it without money on the table. The game here deals real hands from a properly shuffled deck, pays from the standard paytable, and includes a trainer that shows the correct decision before you act. There are no accounts, no deposits and nothing to cash out.

How the numbers were worked out

Most sites covering this game quote the same figures from the same source. The ones here were computed from scratch, and they can be reproduced:

• The house edge comes from enumerating every possible deal: all 1,326 starting hands against every ordered runout of community cards. Optimal play gives 4.915% of the ante; the simplified chart this site teaches gives 4.929%, so following it costs about 0.014% of an ante per hand versus perfect play.
• The 3-Card Bonus figure of 2.1357% is exact, computed over all 22,100 possible three-card combinations rather than sampled.
• The hand evaluator that decides what you are paid was checked against an independent implementation on all 2,598,960 possible five-card hands, with no disagreements.
• The odds calculator is not an approximation. Give it two hole cards and it walks all 19,600 possible boards before answering.

The strategy taught here follows the basic strategy published by Michael Shackleford (Wizard of Odds), which we then verified independently against our own enumeration rather than taking on trust. Where a design draft and the maths disagreed, the maths won.

What this is not

This is not a casino and not an affiliate for one. Nothing here can be wagered, and no real-money operator is promoted or recommended. Practising against a paytable is useful for learning the decisions; it will not make the game beatable, and the About figures above exist partly to make that plain.

Corrections

If you spot an error in the strategy, the payouts or the maths, it is worth telling us. The figures above are meant to be checkable, which only matters if mistakes get fixed.