Teen Patti
Also known as Teen Pathi, Flash, Flush
- Players
- 3-8 players (best with 5)
- Deck
- 1 standard deck (52 cards); chips or counters for the pot
- Time
- 30-60 minutes
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Category
- Bluffing
Setup
Teen Patti is Hindi for "three cards", and that is the whole of the equipment list: three cards each, a pot in the middle, and everyone playing against everyone else. Nobody banks it. It is close kin to the British game of Three Card Brag, and it is a festival game: one account ties it to Janmashtami, the celebration of Krishna's birth. It came from India and is played through South Asia more widely.
Any sensible number can play — four to seven is where it sits best. An ordinary 52-card pack, aces high down to twos, and no jokers unless you have agreed otherwise.
Agree the minimum stake before anything else, because every number in this game is a multiple of it. Call it one unit. Everyone puts one unit into the pot as the boot, and the pot is what the hand is played for.
The dealer gives out three cards each, singly, face down.
Then the choice that makes this game what it is. You may look at your cards, or you may leave them alone. A player who has looked is seen; a player who has not is blind. Blind players bet half what seen players do, which is a real and permanent discount for going in with no idea what you are holding — and going the other way is a one-way door. Once you look, you are seen for the rest of the hand.
Play
Betting opens to the dealer's left and travels clockwise for as many circuits as it takes. At your turn you either put money in and stay, or fold and lose whatever you have already staked. There is no equalising of bets here and no calling: this is not poker betting, and there is no such thing as a showdown among three or more players.
What you must pay turns on a running figure called the current stake, which starts at one unit. Both rates are ranges, and each also decides what the next player inherits:
- Blind. Put in anything from one stake up to two, and no more. Whatever sum you lay down is passed on unchanged as the next player's stake.
- Seen. Put in anything from two stakes up to four. What gets passed on is half of it.
That halving is the mechanism behind the discount. A blind player is always paying about a unit where a seen player pays two, all the way down the table, and the stake climbs only as fast as somebody deliberately pushes it. A blind player may look at their cards when their own turn arrives, and pays the seen rate from that moment on.
The hand ends one of two ways. Everybody but one folds, and that player collects without exposing a thing — which is what makes bluffing pay. Or the field narrows to two and one of them buys a show.
The show has its own rules and they are pointedly not symmetrical:
- Nobody can call for one while three or more players are still in.
- Blind, it costs you one stake, no matter what your opponent is. Your own cards stay face down until the money is in the pot.
- Seen, against a blind opponent: the accounts disagree, and it is worth settling out loud before the first deal. One forbids it outright — bet on or get out — which leaves a blind player unshiftable except by folding, and makes that prohibition the blind player's real protection. The other allows it, at four times the current stake, which makes the same position merely expensive.
- Two seen players: either of them may buy it, for two stakes.
Both hands then go face up and the better one takes the pot. On a tie the accounts part again. Under one, asking is what costs you the hand — your opponent takes the pot. Under the other it is halved between you and who asked makes no difference.
There is one more move, available only when every player still in the hand is seen. Immediately after putting in the minimum, you may ask the player who bet just before you for a compromise, also called a sideshow. They can refuse, in which case betting simply carries on with the next player and nothing is lost but information. If they accept, the two of you compare cards privately, and whoever is lower folds on the spot — and on a tie it is the asker who goes. It is a way of removing one opponent without exposing anything to the table.
Goal & scoring
Win the pot. There is no running score and nothing carries between hands — each deal is settled in full and the cards go back in.
Six kinds of hand, and any hand of a better kind beats any hand of a worse one outright. Within a kind, you compare rank:
- Trio, three of a rank, ranked by that rank — aces at the top of them, twos at the bottom.
- Straight run, a three-card run with all three in one suit.
- Normal run, the same but with the suits not matching.
- Colour, three cards of one suit that do not run. Compare the top card, then the next, then the last: A-K-J is the best and 5-3-2 the worst.
- Pair. Compare the pair first and only then the spare card, so A-A-K is the best pair hand and 2-2-3 the worst.
- High card, none of the above. A-K-J is the best of these and 5-3-2 the worst.
Runs wrap at one end only. Both A-K-Q and A-2-3 are legal, and both are better than K-Q-J. Which of the two tops the other is a genuine disagreement between good sources — some rank A-2-3 highest, others A-K-Q — so settle it at your own table before the first deal rather than over an exposed hand. What nobody allows is going round the corner: K-A-2 is not a run at all, though three of a suit will still make a colour of it.
The pot goes to the last player standing, or to the better hand at a show.
One account works the probabilities and finds something awkward at the top of the ladder: the straight run is rarer than the trio — 48 of them against 52 trios — and yet it ranks below. A house rule that evens the two exists, counting 2-3-5 of a suit as a straight run, which brings each to 52.
| Scores | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Boot, before the deal | 1 unit each | — |
| A blind player's bet | 1 to 2 times the stake | — |
| A seen player's bet | 2 to 4 times the stake | — |
| New stake after a blind bet | the amount just staked | — |
| New stake after a seen bet | half the amount just staked | — |
| Show demanded by a blind player | the current stake | allowed against a seen or a blind opponent |
| Show demanded by a seen player | twice the current stake | only against another seen player, never against a blind one |
| Compromise, or sideshow | nothing extra | only when every remaining player is seen; may be refused |
Variants
Jokers wild — Shuffle in the two jokers and treat them as any card their holder likes, which lifts a middling three cards into a trio far more often than feels reasonable. It makes the game louder and shorter and materially devalues everything below a run, since a single wild card turns any pair into a trio. Some tables instead nominate an ordinary rank as wild for the hand — the deuces, or a card drawn at random after the deal — which has the same effect with less of the all-or-nothing feel.
A limit on playing blind — Cap how long anybody may stay blind: three turns is the figure both accounts give as their example, and one also offers two, after which you must look at your cards and pay the seen rate from then on. Without a cap, a stubborn blind player at a table of cautious seen ones is genuinely hard to shift, because they pay half price for every circuit and cannot be called to a show. The limit exists to stop that becoming the entire game, and it is worth agreeing at a table where somebody already knows this.
Bigger bets — Two ways to loosen the ceiling, listed separately by one account. Raise the caps: a blind player's ceiling rises past double the standing stake, and a seen player's past four times it, which lets somebody with a trio actually build a pot rather than inching it upwards. And double what a show costs — the current stake becomes twice it for a blind player and four times for a seen one — which makes the final confrontation something you have to want rather than something to reach for out of impatience.
Suits break the tie — Rank the suits, spades highest and clubs lowest, and use that to settle two hands that are otherwise identical. It removes split pots and tied shows entirely, which some tables prefer to the alternatives of the asker losing or the money being divided. Worth stating out loud, because a player who has only met the game without it will assume a tie is a tie.
Live Teen Patti — Not really this game, and the reason people mistake Teen Patti for a casino game. Casinos offer a table game under the name that is essentially Three Card Poker played against the house: you bet against the dealer rather than the other players, there is no blind and seen distinction, no bluffing and no pot. What it borrows is the hand ranking, which is Teen Patti's rather than poker's, plus assorted side bets. Since 'teen patti' just means three cards, the name is not unfair — but the game across a kitchen table and the game in the casino have almost nothing in common.
Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, GameRules.com.