Royal Match
Pays if your first two cards are the same suit, and much more if they are a suited king and queen.
There is no single answer to what Royal Match costs, because there is no single Royal Match. At six decks the published pay tables run from 3.70% to 6.67% — 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Royal 25:1, suited 2.5:1 | 25:1 / 2.5:1 / 2.5:1 | 10.86 | 8.33 | 7.08 | 6.83 | 6.67 | 6.46 |
| Royal 10:1, suited 3:1 (single deck only) | 10:1 / 3:1 / 3:1 | 3.77 | — | — | — | — | — |
| Royal 25:1, suited blackjack 5:1, suited 2.5:1 | 25:1 / 5:1 / 2.5:1 | 7.84 | 5.34 | 4.11 | 3.86 | 3.70 | 3.49 |
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 2.97 points — royal 25:1, suited blackjack 5:1, suited 2.5:1 against royal 25:1, suited 2.5:1. Nothing about the game changes between them.
What it actually pays, and how often
The breakdown below is for royal 25:1, suited blackjack 5:1, suited 2.5:1 at 6 decks — the best-odds version, so the most flattering case this bet has. It wins at all 24.76% 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Suited king-queen | 25:1 | 144 | 0.30% | 337 |
| Suited blackjack | 5:1 | 576 | 1.19% | 84 |
| Any other suited pair | 2.5:1 | 11,292 | 23.27% | 4 |
Where the money actually comes from
Sort that table by how much each row contributes rather than by what it pays, and any other suited pair turns out to hand back 81% of everything this bet ever returns. The headline tier — suited king-queen, at 25:1 — is what the felt advertises and what anybody sitting down is picturing. It arrives once in 337 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 8.1× 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.