The Hardest Caribbean Stud Hands and How to Play Them

Something that’s really interesting about Caribbean Stud is that it’s virtually impossible to really learn the perfect strategies. There’s so much information between your five cards and their relationship to the dealer’s up card that it’s pretty overwhelming at times. While many hands are easy to play in this game, we’re not really concerned with those because we want to focus on areas where we can improve and make gains. That’s exactly why we’re going to take a look at the hardest Caribbean Stud games that you can find and show you how to play them.

Suppose the dealer is showing an 8 and we have AKT84. Everyone knows that AK-high hands can go either way in this game, and we have to decide if we want to fold or raise. There are two important features of this situation that will steer you in the right direction. First, the dealer’s up card is lower than a king, and that increases his chances of not qualifying which is a good result for us. It also increases the dealer’s chances of having a worse ace-high hand than us. Second, the dealer’s up card matches one of ours. That drastically decreases the chances of the dealer having a pair. All of this information combines to make this situation a pretty clear raise.

Let’s look at a different example of when the dealer is showing a K and we have AKJ94. The main thing to notice here is that the dealer has an ace or a king, so the chances that we run into AK-high are increased substantially. It’s also worth noting that we have a jack in our hand (though a queen would work as well). This means that we’re going to win the vast majority of those AK-high vs. AK-high encounters. Add that to the decreased chance of the dealer having a pair like in the hand before, and we have a straight-forward raise.

Finally let’s have a dealer 7 against our AKQ86. If the dealer’s card doesn’t match any of ours in an AK-high situation, then we can only raise if we have a queen in our hand and the dealer’s card doesn’t beat more than one of our cards. So in this scenario, we can raise against a 7, but we would need to fold against a 9. That’s a very small difference that shows just how tricky these hands can be.