The short version
Raise 3x with any pair. Raise 1x with two points or more, and with 6-5 suited. Fold everything else, which is 412 of the 1,326 starting hands, or 31.07% of the time. Those four lines are not an approximation: they match perfect play on all 1,326 starting hands.
3rd Street is the cheapest decision in Mississippi Stud and the one that decides most of the hand. You are looking at two cards with nothing else on the table, and the only thing you can lose by folding is the ante you have already committed. Get this street right and the rest of the game is a good deal more forgiving.
The whole street, in four lines
3rd Street: two cards
- Raise 3xwith any pair, from aces down to deuces.
- Raise 1xwith at least two points.
- Raise 1xwith 6-5 suited.
- Foldeverything else.
The point system
Everything above rests on a three-band count of card ranks. It is the same count used on every later street, so it is worth learning once.
Two points on 3rd Street therefore means one of two things: a single jack, queen, king or ace with anything at all beside it, or two cards both in the 6-to-10 band. Suits do not enter into it, with the single exception noted below.
Every starting hand, on one grid
All 169 starting-hand types. Suited hands sit above the diagonal, offsuit hands below it, and the pairs run down the middle.
| A | K | Q | J | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | 3x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x |
| K | 1x | 3x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x |
| Q | 1x | 1x | 3x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x |
| J | 1x | 1x | 1x | 3x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x |
| 10 | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 3x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | Fold | Fold | Fold | Fold |
| 9 | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 3x | 1x | 1x | 1x | Fold | Fold | Fold | Fold |
| 8 | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 3x | 1x | 1x | Fold | Fold | Fold | Fold |
| 7 | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 3x | 1x | Fold | Fold | Fold | Fold |
| 6 | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | 3x | 1x | Fold | Fold | Fold |
| 5 | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | Fold | Fold | Fold | Fold | Fold | 3x | Fold | Fold | Fold |
| 4 | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | Fold | Fold | Fold | Fold | Fold | Fold | 3x | Fold | Fold |
| 3 | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | Fold | Fold | Fold | Fold | Fold | Fold | Fold | 3x | Fold |
| 2 | 1x | 1x | 1x | 1x | Fold | Fold | Fold | Fold | Fold | Fold | Fold | Fold | 3x |
13 hand types raise 3x, 105 raise 1x and 51 fold. Weighted by how many of the 1,326 actual starting hands each type stands for, that is 78 hands at 3x, 836 at 1x and 412 folded.
Why any pair goes straight to 3x
Raising the maximum with a pair of deuces feels wrong the first time you are asked to do it. It is not close. Every pair is a strong favourite here, because a pair is three cards away from two pair, three of a kind, a full house or quads, and the pay table rewards all four generously against a bet you were able to make while it was still cheap.
Even the worst pair in the deck returns more than two antes on average. Compare that with the best non-pair starting hand, queen-jack suited, at +1.17 antes. The gap between the bottom of the pair range and the top of everything else is the single largest step on this street, and it is why the pair rule has no exceptions in it.
The one suited exception
6-5 suited is the only hand in the deck where the suits change the answer. It carries one point, which would normally fold, but the straight and flush potential is just enough to make raising the better of two poor options: −0.960 antes for raising 1x against −1.000 for folding. You save four cents on the dollar.
Two near-misses are worth knowing so you do not over-apply it. 7-5 suited is a fold, and raising it costs 0.65% of an ante, the tightest decision on the whole street. 6-4 suited is also a fold, at a cost of 3.23%. Neither is a disaster, but neither is the exception either, and players who remember “suited connectors” rather than “6-5 suited” end up raising both.
Most raises are damage limitation
Of the 1,326 starting hands, only 214 (16.14%) are expected to make money. All 78 pairs qualify, along with sixteen suited hand types and six offsuit ones. Everything else you raise is still a losing hand; raising simply loses less than folding.
Ace-deuce offsuit is the clearest case. Raising 1x is worth −0.901 antes and folding is worth −1.000, so the raise is correct and it still costs you nine hundredths of an ante. This is the part of the strategy that feels wrong at the table and is not: on this street you are frequently choosing between two losses, and the discipline is in taking the smaller one rather than pretending there is a good option.
The three mistakes worth fixing
- 01Folding ace-ragAny ace, king, queen or jack is two points on its own and always a 1x raise, whatever sits next to it. Folding ace-deuce offsuit costs about a tenth of an ante every time.
- 02Raising 3x with big suited cardsQueen-jack suited is the best non-pair hand in the deck and it is still a 1x raise. Going 3x with it costs 2.14% of an ante. Save the maximum raise for pairs.
- 03Playing every suited connectorOnly 6-5 suited survives the one-point rule. 7-5 suited, 6-4 suited and the rest are folds, and treating them as exceptions turns a 31% fold rate into something much looser and more expensive.
This street is already perfect
Some published charts trade a little accuracy for memorability. This one does not, at least not here. Comparing the four rules above against the highest-value action for every one of the 1,326 starting hands, computed by working backwards through all 117,600 ways the three community cards can arrive, they agree 1,326 times out of 1,326. There is no hand on 3rd Street where the chart is leaving anything on the table.
The 0.014% of an ante that separates the full chart from perfect play (4.929% against 4.915%) is all given up on 4th and 5th Street, where the rules have more work to do. The full strategy covers those streets, and the pocket guide puts all three on one page.
You fold nearly a third of hands here, and each one costs a single ante. That is the whole mechanism: 3rd Street is where you buy your way out of the hands that would otherwise cost you four, six or ten antes further down the table. Players who cannot bring themselves to fold a pretty-looking 9-4 suited are not losing an ante, they are losing the option to stop.
The free table shows the correct 3rd Street action before you act, which is the fastest way to get the grid above into your hands rather than onto a card in your pocket.