Perfect Pairs
Pays if your first two cards are a pair, more if they match in colour, most if they are the identical card twice.
There is no single answer to what Perfect Pairs costs, because there is no single Perfect Pairs. At six decks the published pay tables run from 4.18% to 9.97% — 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 | 25:1 / 12:1 / 6:1 | 47.06 | 22.33 | 10.14 | 7.72 | 6.11 | 4.10 |
| Pay table B | 30:1 / 10:1 / 5:1 | 54.90 | 25.24 | 10.63 | 7.72 | 5.79 | 3.37 |
| Pay table C | 25:1 / 12:1 / 5:1 | 50.98 | 26.21 | 14.01 | 11.58 | 9.97 | 7.95 |
| Pay table D | 25:1 / 15:1 / 5:1 | 45.10 | 20.39 | 8.21 | 5.79 | 4.18 | 2.17 |
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 5.79 points — pay table d against pay table c. Nothing about the game changes between them.
What it actually pays, and how often
The breakdown below is for pay table d at 6 decks — the best-odds version, so the most flattering case this bet has. It wins at all 7.40% 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Perfect pair (identical card) | 25:1 | 780 | 1.61% | 62 |
| Coloured pair | 15:1 | 936 | 1.93% | 52 |
| Mixed pair | 5:1 | 1,872 | 3.86% | 26 |
Where the money actually comes from
Sort that table by how much each row contributes rather than by what it pays, and perfect pair (identical card) turns out to hand back 45% of everything this bet ever returns. Unusually for a side bet, that is also its rarest and best-paying outcome — the whole value of the wager is concentrated in the one result you will almost never see, at one in 62.
Where it sits
Even in its best published form, this bet is 9.2× 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.