Lucky Ladies
Pays on a two-card 20, with bigger tiers the more exactly your two cards match.
There is no single answer to what Lucky Ladies costs, because there is no single Lucky Ladies. At six decks the published pay tables run from 6.22% to 24.71% — 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pay table A | 1000:1 / 125:1 / 19:1 / 9:1 / 4:1 | 38.16 | 30.05 | 26.04 | 25.24 | 24.71 | 24.05 |
| Pay table B | 1000:1 / 200:1 / 25:1 / 10:1 / 4:1 | 36.05 | 24.94 | 19.46 | 18.37 | 17.64 | 16.73 |
| Pay table D, with a consolation on any queen | 100:1 / 30:1 / 10:1 / 3:1 / 1:1 / 1:1 | 22.47 | 12.66 | 7.82 | 6.86 | 6.22 | 5.42 |
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 18.49 points — pay table d, with a consolation on any queen against pay table a. Nothing about the game changes between them.
What it actually pays, and how often
The breakdown below is for pay table d, with a consolation on any queen at 6 decks — the best-odds version, so the most flattering case this bet has. It wins at all 21.27% 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Two queens of hearts | 100:1 | 15 | 0.0309% | 3,236 |
| Matched 20 (identical cards) | 30:1 | 225 | 0.46% | 216 |
| Suited 20 | 10:1 | 1,008 | 2.08% | 48 |
| Any other 20 | 3:1 | 3,888 | 8.01% | 12 |
| Any queen | 1:1 | 3,888 | 8.01% | 12 |
| Queen of hearts | 1:1 | 1,296 | 2.67% | 37 |
Where the money actually comes from
Sort that table by how much each row contributes rather than by what it pays, and any other 20 turns out to hand back 33% of everything this bet ever returns. The headline tier — two queens of hearts, at 100:1 — is what the felt advertises and what anybody sitting down is picturing. It arrives once in 3,236 hands. The bet is really the small, frequent payout wearing the big one’s clothes.
Where it sits
Even in its best published form, this bet is 13.6× 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.