HOW IT PLAYS
The ladder
Ante up and one card comes face up. Call whether the next card is
HIGHER or LOWER. Get it right and your pot is
multiplied, the new card becomes the card to beat, and you climb a rung.
Get it wrong and the pot is gone.
You may BANK the pot at any point once you have won at least one rung.
The ladder stops at 8 rungs — the eighth correct call banks itself.
A tie loses
If the next card is the same rank as the card showing, that is neither
higher nor lower, and the hand busts. Aces are low (1), Kings are high (13).
Suits are decoration; they never affect a result.
Where the multipliers come from
One freshly shuffled 52-card deck per hand, and nothing is put back. Every
multiplier is priced off the exact cards still unseen:
multiplier = floor(100 × 0.95 ÷ p) ÷ 100
where p is the true chance that side wins right now. A coin-flip call
pays ×1.90. A 12-in-51 long shot pays ×4.03. When the card
showing is an Ace or a King, one side is impossible, pays nothing and is
switched off.
Because the odds move as the deck thins, keeping track of what has gone is a
real (small) edge. The strip along the bottom of the felt counts the unseen
cards for you, so you can play the deck without a notepad.
The 5% take, stated plainly
That 0.95 in the formula is the house. Every rung hands back 95¢ of every
chip it should. Turn on SHOW EV and you can watch it: the expected value of
taking any call and banking straight afterwards is 0.95 × pot, while
banking right now is worth the full pot.
So the honest answer is: banking always beats climbing.
Climbing k rungs returns about 0.95k — 95% at one rung, 66% at
eight. The ladder is a thrill, not an edge. We would rather tell you that than
let you find it out the slow way.
Rounding
The pot carries two decimals while you climb. When you bank, you are paid
floor(pot) — whole chips only, the fraction stays with the house.
Multipliers are floored to whole hundredths for the same reason.
Keys
- H higher
- L lower
- B bank
- Space / Enter deal
- T turbo
- E show EV
Your bankroll, ledger and settings live in this browser only.
No account, no server, no money. Clearing site data starts you over at
1,000 chips.