Mississippi Stud

Today, Mississippi Stud occupies rarified air within the crowded table game landscape. It has permanent placements in mega-resort casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, riverboat Mississippi, and tribal gaming establishments scattered around the country. Strategy books and websites are routinely published to serve the booming Mississippi Stud market. The game continues to spread even today.

Our expert team at OUSC has gathered all the information necessary to provide the perfect entry point into the world of Mississippi Stud. Here you’ll find a detailed walkthrough designed to introduce the rules and gameplay procedures and a running example hand that will help clarify any complicated elements. After that, we’ve compiled a detailed list of casinos where you can find Mississippi Stud tables, followed by a discussion on the house edge, probability, and other strategic concerns.

What is Mississippi Stud

Mark Yoseloff is a revered figure among the casino gambling crowd, and for a good reason. During the last few decades, Yoseloff contributed a career’s worth of innovation and insight to the industry. First, he specialized in slot machine design for Bally Technologies in the 1990s. Then, he continued as CEO and Chairman of Shuffle Master from 2000 through 2009. Among the most popular of Yoseloff’s casino game innovations is a hybrid table game known as Mississippi Stud.

The first trademark application for this table game variant on traditional five-card stud got filed by Shuffle Master in 2009. Since that time, Mississippi Stud has flourished throughout casinos all over the world. It boasts a simple gameplay structure, multiple player decision points, and an escalating paytable. Some say it’s the proverbial “holy grail” of table games. Its popularity even caused spin-offs like Big Raise Stud, but in the end, the base game prevailed.

Even better, players can punish the house a bit with the ability to maximize wagers when holding good cards. In fact, many casino gambling experts consider Mississippi Stud among the most vulnerable in the house when it comes to skill-based play.

Mississippi Stud Rules

Fittingly, as one of the more popular table games ever devised, Mississippi Stud offers straightforward gameplay.

Like most hybrid table games, you’ll be sitting at a semicircular table along with up to five other players as the dealer runs the game from the opposite side of the table.

Mississippi Stud utilizes the standard 52 card deck of playing cards, and all cards hold their usual poker values. Thus, 2s are the lowest card, and aces are high.

Furthermore, as a five-card stud variant, the traditional poker hand hierarchy is also used to judge completed five-card hands. If it’s been a while since you saw a straight or filled a flush, take a look below for the complete listing of poker hand ranks:

As you can see, the best possible hand in this game is a royal flush, followed be a straight flush, four a kind, a full house, a flush, a straight, three of a kind, two pairs, one pair, and high card.

The objective of Mississippi Stud is simple enough: attempt to make the strongest possible five-card poker hand. In this game, you aren’t squaring off against a dealer’s hand. Instead, players combine their two personal cards (the “hole” cards) with three community cards to form a five-card poker hand. Your bets get paid out according to the strength of that final hand, so you can’t beat or lose to anyone else, and only your cards matter.

How to Play Mississippi Stud

Mississippi Stud Pay Table

As you can see, the name of the game is making monster hands, as the premium holdings like a royal flush or straight flush can produce “jackpot” payouts of $2,500 and $500 on just your $5 ante bet alone.

Even better, the payout rates listed above get applied to the total sum of your ante bet plus the three street-based bets. So if you find a top-level hand and max out the betting to $50 (using a $5 base ante increment), you can take down $25,000 for a royal flush, $5,000 for a straight flush, $2,000 for four of a kind, and so on down the line.

Fair warning, though: you won’t be seeing those hands very frequently. Forming a perfect five-card combination using five cards and five alone is quite difficult. Usually, in stud-based games, you’ll have seven cards with which to find the best five-card combination, but in Mississippi Stud, five cards are all you get.

Best Places to Play Mississippi Stud

With a name like Mississippi Stud, this game is is an obvious favorite for players who frequent the thriving casino community in and around Mississippi.

The game comes from a regional poker variant known as Mississippi Stud Poker, in which players traditionally battle each other rather than the house. This game removes “fourth street” to leave three betting rounds – the same as in the Mississippi Stud table game.

You can find Mississippi Stud played in most casinos and card rooms in the state, and even some online poker sites. Of course, every house has a table games manager making placement decisions, so it may be absent from a few venues here and there. You can also find Mississippi Stud in Las Vegas.

Take a look below for a complete listing of Mississippi’s casino properties:

Fortunately for players who reside outside of the Magnolia State, the game of Mississippi Stud has become practically universal within the world of casino gambling.

For the most part, any major casino resort you find yourself in will likely have at least a table or two running. Even smaller tribal casinos and local gaming establishments spread the game consistently.

Each of the following casino properties owned and operated by Caesars Entertainment has been verified to offer Mississippi Stud at this time. This list is in alphabetical order, so to locate casinos in your area, simply use a CTRL+F search and input your state to highlight all venues nearby:

This list highlights only Caesar’s Entertainment owned venues. If your favorite casino doesn’t appear here, just make a quick phone call and ask for the table games manager there. They’ll be able to answer immediately, and the friendlier ones will even help you find the game if their house doesn’t currently offer it.

Strategic Considerations for Mississippi Stud

With poker-based hand rankings, multiple player decision points, and even bet sizing options, Mississippi Stud can provide an entertaining, interactive gameplay experience.

Accordingly, the game relies on “card sense,” mathematical skill, and dumb luck (although luck plays a role as it does in any gambling game).

When it comes to playing your cards correctly, you should use the following guidelines. This strategy is broken down based on how many cards you currently hold, as well as the relative strength of your current hand:

By sticking closely to these strategic guidelines – which will become much easier after you actually play a few hands for yourself – the house edge in Mississippi Stud stands at 4.91 percent.

Savvy casino game players will note that this house edge rate is rather high, especially for a popular game. However, as the analysis shows, the house edge is not the best metric to use when assessing the playability of a game like Mississippi Stud – which incorporates three additional betting rounds.

According to Shackleford, players can expect to bet 3.59 “units” per hand or 3.59 increments of their initial ante bet. By dividing the house edge rate of 4.91 by the average units bet of 3.59, he arrives at an “element of risk” percentage of 1.37 percent.

For comparison’s sake, consider that basic blackjack played using optimal strategy offers an element of risk of 0.38 percent. Similarly designed table games like Let It Ride and Caribbean Stud offer 2.85 percent and 2.56 percent, respectively.

Mississippi Stud is one of the better bets found in the table games area from that vantage point.

Finally, sound strategy dictates bringing enough bankroll with you to bear the large bet sizes and frequent betting found in Mississippi Stud. Remember, even when starting with just $5 on the ante bet, you can easily put in $50 by the time a hand ends. So, use proper money management to cope with the game’s inevitable swings.