21+3
Scores your two cards plus the dealer’s up-card as a three-card poker hand.
There is no single answer to what 21+3 costs, because there is no single 21+3. At six decks the published pay tables run from 3.24% to 13.39% — the same name, the same cards, a different little printed table. The main game next to it keeps 0.4568%.
Every pay table, every deck count
| Pay table | Pays | 1D | 2D | 4D | 5D | 6D | 8D |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Original, everything pays 9:1 | 9:1 / 9:1 / 9:1 / 9:1 | 13.30 | 7.26 | 4.24 | 3.64 | 3.24 | 2.74 |
| Tiered, 100/35/33/10/5 | 100:1 / 35:1 / 33:1 / 10:1 / 5:1 | 18.59 | 11.02 | 5.99 | 4.89 | 4.14 | 3.18 |
| Xtreme, 30/20/10/5 | 30:1 / 20:1 / 10:1 / 5:1 | 22.73 | 17.27 | 14.38 | 13.79 | 13.39 | 12.89 |
House edge %, by number of decks · darker figures have a published counterpart that was checked against
At six decks the gap between the best and worst version of this one bet is 10.15 points — original, everything pays 9:1 against xtreme, 30/20/10/5. Nothing about the game changes between them.
What it actually pays, and how often
The breakdown below is for original, everything pays 9:1 at 6 decks — the best-odds version, so the most flattering case this bet has. It wins at all 9.68% of the time, which is the number the big payouts are built on: everything else is a losing stake.
| Hand | Pays | Combinations | Probability | One in |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flush | 9:1 | 292,896 | 5.84% | 17 |
| Straight | 9:1 | 155,520 | 3.10% | 32 |
| Three of a kind | 9:1 | 25,272 | 0.50% | 198 |
| Straight flush | 9:1 | 10,368 | 0.21% | 484 |
| Suited three of a kind | 9:1 | 1,040 | 0.0207% | 4,831 |
Where the money actually comes from
Sort that table by how much each row contributes rather than by what it pays, and flush turns out to hand back 60% of everything this bet ever returns. This pay table pays the same 9:1 for every winning hand, headline tiers included, which quietly makes the whole bet one question: are your three cards the same suit? A flush is 282× more likely than the rarest thing on the table and pays exactly the same for it.
Where it sits
Even in its best published form, this bet is 7.1× as expensive as the hand it is sitting beside. Put differently: a player flat-betting the main game and the same amount on this side bet is paying most of their evening’s cost to the smaller of the two wagers.
Figures checked against the published analysis of this bet; the side-bets index has the method and the comparison across all four.