TIDE POKER

draw poker with a coach

Deal five cards · tap the ones to keep · draw new ones. A pair of jacks or better pays.

◉ 1,000

DRILL

PAYTABLE

HANDS

STAKE PER HAND

10

Dealing…

The log

Your play

Free draw poker, play money only. Classic 8/5 Jacks-or-Better. A tide-games boat · source on GitHub.

About the maths and the ⚓ Tide

The coach isn't a chart: for every deal, strategy.js tries all 32 ways to hold and every one of the draws that could follow — 2.6 million hands — and knows the exact average return of each. With perfect play this paytable returns 97.3% of what you bet; the tests prove the solver lands on the classic strategy.

⚓ Tide mode is provably fair: your hand is shuffled by a Bitcoin testnet block that hasn't been mined yet, and your draw by the block after it — so nobody, not even us, can know or rig the cards. Anyone can re-check a Tide hand from public chain data (verify in the log). It's slow on purpose: about 10 minutes to deal and 10 to draw — play other modes while you wait. An honest caveat: testnet blocks are cheap to mine, so a determined miner could in principle try many blocks — fair enough for play money, not yet for real stakes.

The strategy guide

Hold the first line your hand matches (18 lines). This is the classic 8/5 Jacks-or-Better strategy — and it isn't taken on trust: the coach computes every deal exactly, and the tests check it agrees.

On the 9/6 and Bonus tables the list barely changes (on Bonus, three aces are worth even more to keep) — the coach recomputes every hand for whichever table you play. High cards are jacks, queens, kings and aces. Two suited high cards beat any unsuited ones. Never hold a “kicker” beside a pair. When in doubt, ask for a hint — the coach computes the exact answer for every deal.

Stats & achievements

How to play

Deal. You get five cards.
Hold. Tap the cards you want to keep — they lift and say HELD. Tap again to let one go.
Draw. Every card you didn't hold is replaced. Your final five are paid by the table at the top of the felt.

Pays are “× your stake”: a pair of jacks or better gives your stake back, two pair doubles it, and a royal flush pays 800×.

The coach

For every deal the coach works out the perfect hold exactly. For your first 15 hands the best cards are marked ⭐; after that, tap Hint whenever you like. After each draw the coach tells you whether you held right — and if not, what the best hold was, why, and roughly what the habit costs. The strategy guide (📖 up top) sums it up in 18 lines.

Play several hands

Choose 3, 5 or 10 hands: your held cards are copied to every hand, and each hand draws from its own fresh deck.

Daily deal

Everyone gets the same 20 deals today. Your score is how many of the 20 you hold perfectly, and how many chips wrong holds gave away — luck can't touch it. Share it and compare.

Drills

Only the tricky decisions, one after another, graded instantly. Get a kind of hand right five times in a row (no hints) to master it 🏅 — master ten kinds to earn the Scholar badge.

⚓ Tide

The provably fair mode: real Bitcoin (testnet) blocks shuffle your cards, so nobody can rig them. A Tide hand takes about 20 minutes — you can keep playing other modes while it comes in.

Keys

1–5 hold · D (or Space) deal / draw · B hint · G guide · ↑↓ stake

Settings

Daily deal

Hand review

Out of chips