About Practice Table Games
Practice Table Games is a free website for people who want to learn casino table games before they sit down at a real table. Pick a game, play hands with play money, and a coach shows you the right move at every decision and explains why.
Who it is for
Anyone heading to Las Vegas or a local casino who wants to know three things before they play:
- How the game works, including every bet and what it pays.
- The real odds, including the house edge on each side bet.
- Exactly what to do at each decision, so nothing at the table catches you off guard.
Play money only
Everything here uses play money. There are no deposits, no prizes and nothing to win. There are no accounts and no logins, and nothing is saved between visits: refresh the page and you start over with a fresh $1,000 play-money bankroll. We do not link to real-money gambling sites.
How our odds are calculated
Every number on this site is our own work, calculated from the deck, the dice and the rules and payouts shown on each table. Casinos set the rules and payouts; the math that follows from them is ours. We label each figure by how it was made, and we'd rather print nothing than a number we can't stand behind.
- Exact. Counted over every possible deal or roll. Hand chances in Ultimate Texas Hold'em come from all 133,784,560 seven-card hands; Three Card Poker's play-or-fold odds and its side bets from every hand the dealer could hold; Let It Ride's strategy and house edge from every way each of the 22,100 starting hands can finish; every craps bet from the 36 ways two dice land. "Exact" means exact for the rules and payouts shown. Your casino's may differ.
- Model. Blackjack strategy and house edges come from our solver, which works from a full shoe of the size you pick, removes your first two cards and the dealer's up card, and allows one split. It is close to a real game but not a casino-specific house edge: deeper shoes, resplits and other rules can change the answer.
- Estimate. The Ultimate Texas Hold'em preflop chart. For each of the 169 starting hands we solved 100 to 2,400 random flops exactly, every turn, river and dealer hand, and compared raising 4x with checking. 500 of the 1,326 possible hands raise. Twelve hands are within our margin of error and are named as close calls on the game page. Raising 3x never beat both 4x and checking.
- Not published. The overall house edge of the Ultimate Texas Hold'em main game. We haven't finished a full solve of the whole game, so we don't print a figure.
Rules of thumb, checked against the math
At a real table you can't run a calculation, so each game teaches short rules you can remember. We test every rule against the exact answer:
- Three Card Poker, Q-6-4: makes the exactly right play-or-fold call on all 22,100 starting hands.
- Let It Ride ride-or-pull rules: make the exactly right call on all 22,100 three-card hands and all 270,725 four-card hands.
- Ultimate Texas Hold'em river, 21 dealer outs: matches the exact decision on 96.3% of river spots, costing about 0.004 Antes per spot. No other cutoff does better.
- Ultimate Texas Hold'em flop rules: match the exact decision on 98.1% of flop spots, costing about 0.001 Antes per spot.
- Blackjack rules of thumb: make the same first move as our full solver on 99.9% of hands.
The Trips and jackpot returns, blackjack's rule effects and every craps bet are recalculated in our test suite each time the site is built. If you spot a number that looks wrong, please tell us.
How the cards are shuffled
Every card and every roll of the dice comes from your browser's cryptographic random number generator, the same kind used to make encryption keys. Decks are shuffled with the standard Fisher-Yates method, and draws are checked so no card or number is favored.
We also mix in random bytes from Cloudflare's servers. Cloudflare feeds its servers' randomness in part from LavaRand, a wall of lava lamps in its San Francisco office filmed by a camera. The two sources are combined so the result is at least as unpredictable as either one alone, and each server byte is used only once. If the server bytes can't load, your browser's generator does the job by itself.
Contact
Questions, corrections or ideas for the next game: hello@practicetablegames.com
Trademarks and credits
Ultimate Texas Hold 'Em® is a registered trademark of Bally Gaming, Inc. This site is not affiliated with or endorsed by Bally Gaming or any casino. Card sounds are by Kenney (kenney.nl), released under CC0.