Poker dice online

How to use these poker dice

1. First roll. Press Roll, or drag the five dice with your finger or mouse and release them over the tray. The dice tumble with real physics, so every result comes from the throw itself.
2. Hold what helps. Tap or click the dice you want to keep to mark them as held; they will not move on the next throw.
3. Reroll the rest. Roll again and only the dice you have not held will move.
4. Read the hand. After each roll the page names the combination: one pair, two pair, three of a kind, straight, full house, four of a kind or five of a kind.

If you play the usual three rolls per turn, each player counts their own rolls and passes the phone or mouse to the next person. That way you can play at a table with no dice or cup, or from different homes and compare hands.

Poker dice faces and their order

A set of poker dice is five six-sided dice that carry the six highest playing cards instead of pips: ace, king, queen, jack, 10 and 9. They rank as the cards do, with the ace highest and the 9 lowest.

Suits play no part in the game. That is why poker dice have no flush and no straight flush: dice can only repeat values or form a run. Makers tell the court cards apart with different colours, but there is no common standard and each set does it its own way.

If you have no poker dice to hand, five ordinary dice work with the equivalents in the table.

Poker dice hands from lowest to highest

These are the hands the page recognises, from weakest to strongest, with the most widely used way of breaking ties:

With only six values there are just two possible straights: the low straight, 9 to king, and the high straight, 10 to ace. The ace does not wrap round below the 9, so A, 9, 10, J, Q is not a straight.

An oddity of this table: a bust can only take four shapes. With no repeats, the five dice show five of the six values; if the 9 or the ace is missing, it is a straight. So every bust contains an ace and a 9 and lacks exactly one of 10, J, Q or K.

Some groups ignore the spare dice and simply call, say, two pairs of kings a tie. That is quicker but produces far more ties, which are then usually settled by a single roll-off between the tied players.

How to play poker dice

There is no single official rulebook, but the classic game described in the standard books of game rules goes like this:

In pubs and bars the dice are shaken in a dice cup, usually leather, and tipped out onto the table or a mat. The cup does not change the rules; it stops anyone placing the dice by hand and, in the bluffing versions, hides the hand from the others.

It is common to play for small stakes per round, counters or points, over several hands, with the winner of a round starting the next one or the turn always passing in the same direction.

Rule variations by country and by table

Poker dice rules vary from table to table far more than card poker. Agree on these points before you start:

Number of rolls

Three rolls is the norm, but some groups allow only two, or limit how many dice can be rerolled. Under many rules the first player sets the limit: if they stand after one or two rolls, everyone else must beat them in no more rolls than that. Some French rules let the first player roll as often as they like, and the others must beat that hand in fewer rolls.

Where the straight sits

• Most commonly it ranks above three of a kind and below a full house, as on this page, copying card poker.
• Some rules do not count straights at all and treat them as a bust.
• In French rules for poker d'as the straight sometimes ranks below three of a kind, and some versions add a short four-dice straight.
• Many Spanish-language cubilete rules do not mention it at all: the ranking simply runs from five of a kind down to one pair.

Aces wild

The French poker d'as has an optional variant where the ace is wild and stands in for any face: three queens and two aces count as five queens. A natural hand always beats the same hand made with a wild ace. Other groups agree on a different wild face. This page counts the ace as an ordinary value, so if you play aces wild you will need to apply that yourselves when reading the hand.

Names of the hands

In English the top hand is five of a kind and a hand with nothing is called a bust or runt. In French ‘poker’ means five of a kind and four of a kind is a ‘carré’; in Spain five of a kind is ‘repóker’ and four is ‘póker’. Worth knowing if you ever read rules translated from another language.

Poker dice odds

Five six-sided dice give 6⁵ = 7,776 equally likely outcomes when each die is counted separately. We went through all 7,776 one by one and classified each. These are the odds of each hand on a single roll:

Each straight, high and low, can be made in 120 ways (the 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 ways of spreading five different values across five dice), 240 in total.

The table shows something striking: a full house comes up more often than a straight (300 against 240 combinations), yet the classic ranking puts the full house higher. The order was borrowed from card poker, where a straight is easier than a full house, and dice players kept it out of habit. It is also surprising that a bust (6.17%) is harder to roll than three of a kind or two pair.

Which dice to hold: odds when you reroll

With three rolls, your final hand depends mostly on what you hold. These figures are also worked out by listing every possible result of the reroll:

If on every roll you always hold the dice of your most common value and reroll the rest, after three rolls you end up with: five of a kind 4.60%, four of a kind 24.48%, three of a kind 45.24%, a pair 25.60% and no repeated value just 0.08%.

Practical tips

History of poker dice and related games

Poker dice appear in the second half of the nineteenth century, not long after card poker spread through the United States. One document carries an exact date: US patent 244,520, granted on 19 July 1881 to Robert A. Bacon of New York. It describes dice bearing the poker cards (ace, king, queen, knave, ten and nine) while keeping the ordinary pips, so they could be used for other dice games too.

From there the game spread with its own name in each language: Würfelpoker in German, poker d'as in French, póker de dados or cubilete in Spanish.

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