Mississippi Stud

Mississippi Stud

Is the Mississippi Stud house edge of about 4.91% expensive? It sounds steep next to blackjack, but the figure is measured per Ante, and the Ante is a small part of what a typical hand puts on the table.


The game works like this. One Ante, two hole cards, then three community cards turned one at a time. Before each card the player either folds or raises by one to three times the Ante. No dealer hand exists; payment depends only on the final five-card hand against a fixed paytable, starting at a push for a pair of sixes through tens and rising from a pair of jacks upward.


Those raises are where the money goes. Under optimal strategy, average total betting per hand runs well above the Ante, which is why the same expected loss expressed per dollar wagered comes out near 1.37%, the element of risk. With a $5 Ante that is roughly $0.25 lost per hand either way; only the ruler changes.


Two errors follow from mixing the rulers. Applying 4.91% to every raised dollar more than triples the real cost. Applying the 1.37% figure to a player who raises on hands that call for a fold understates it, since the optimal-strategy assumption no longer holds.


Expect a wide spread of session results as well. A hand that reaches 3x raises on every street carries ten Ante units, and a run of those landing on a losing board moves a bankroll far faster than the long-run percentage suggests.