Russian Poker

Russian Poker is a banking casino table game rather than a multi-player vying game — every player competes individually against the house dealer (or, at a home table, a rotating banker), not against each other. Each player and the banker are dealt five cards face down, with one of the banker's cards typically shown face up.

Before the showdown, each player has the option to pay an additional fee (commonly equal to their original bet) to discard their entire hand and receive five fresh cards, gambling that the new hand beats what they had. This "buy a new hand" option is the game's signature mechanic, distinguishing it from a simple deal-and-compare game.

Showdown: each player's final five-card hand (using standard poker hand rankings) is compared individually against the banker's hand. A player whose hand beats the banker's wins a payout (often scaled by hand strength, with bonus payouts for strong hands like a straight flush or four-of-a-kind, similar to Caribbean Stud); a player who loses to the banker forfeits their bet.

Historical note: the game's exact origins are debated — it's most strongly associated with Russian and Eastern European casinos from the early-to-mid 1990s onward, though some accounts credit its initial design to a European (often cited as Austrian) gaming equipment company before it was popularized under the "Russian Poker" name.

Strategy notes: Because it's a banker-vs-player game rather than player-vs-player, the central decision is purely mathematical — whether the expected value of paying to swap in a new hand exceeds the expected value of keeping your current hand, based on how it compares to the visible portion of the banker's hand.