If even after checking the kicker your hands are a perfect tie, you can either split the pot or have a tiebreaker reroll. Most friendly games just reroll.
Easy to learn, fast to play, and perfect for making your friends irrationally competitive in record time. Poker Dice is the low-effort, high-satisfaction cousin of traditional poker.
Instead of cards, you’ll be tossing dice and trying to build poker hands like pairs, full houses, and even five of a kind. Poker Dice uses special six-sided dice with playing card faces (9, 10, J, Q, K, A) instead of pips.
The goal is simple: roll the best possible poker hand using five dice. A five of a kind (all dice showing the same value) is the highest hand in Poker Dice. There are no suits used, so you won’t be making flushes in this game. Hands are ranked similarly to poker (with some tweaks we’ll explain), and after everyone takes their turns rolling, the best hand wins the round.
No Poker Dice on hand? No problem. You can use five regular six-sided dice and agree on a mapping. For example, 1 can represent Ace, 6 = King, 5 = Queen, 4 = Jack, 3 = 10, and 2 = 9. As long as everyone knows which die face corresponds to which card rank, you can make it work.
GoalRoll five dice to make the best poker hand. After all players have taken their turn, the highest-ranking hand wins the round.
Fewer RollsWhile the classic rule is up to three rolls per turn, some play with a maximum of two rolls. This makes the game quicker and a bit more challenging, since you only have one chance to improve your hand.
Dice Rolls LimitIn some variations, the number of dice you can reroll is limited – for example, you may only reroll up to three dice each time.
“Stop” RuleAnother interesting variant is if the first player chooses to stop after fewer than 3 rolls, that number becomes the max for everyone else.
Including/Excluding StraightsBecause Poker Dice uses only 9 through Ace, making a straight (a sequence of five in order) is harder and less common than in card poker. Some house rules don’t count straights at all, treating any five distinct values as simply a “bust” with no special value. If you do count straights, they’re normally ranked higher than a three of a kind but lower than a full house. Discuss and agree if “straights” will be a scoring hand and how high they rank, or if they’ll just be considered nothing.
Wild DiceAnother variation is to agree on a wild face. You might designate the Ace as wild so it counts as any rank you want. Using wilds will dramatically change the odds – five of a kind becomes much easier if a face is wild.
The “Horses” RuleIn the variant called “Horses,” if you ever roll five Aces, it automatically loses instead of winning! Yes, you read that right – five of a kind in Aces, the highest possible hand normally, is treated as a losing hand in Horses. This rule is not very common, but it’s a fun variation. Unless you explicitly agree on this variant, assume five aces is a great hand.
Now that we have the equipment and rules down, let’s walk through how the gameplay actually flows and then detail how to score the hands.
Let’s pretend Alice and Lucas are playing poker dice together.
Alice antes one chip into the pot (if playing with betting) and then rolls all five dice. She gets: K, K, Q, 10, 9 on her first roll. She’s got a pair of Kings. Alice decides to keep the two K dice (pair of kings) and reroll the other three (Q, 10, 9) to try for a better hand. On her second roll, those three dice come up K, 10, Q. Now Alice has three Kings (three of a kind) and a 10. She sets aside the three K dice. She has one more roll and only two dice left to possibly improve (the 10 and Q). She considers: with three of a kind, she could aim for a full house by trying to pair either the 10 or Q, or go for four of a kind by getting another King. She decides to keep the 10 (hoping for a pair of 10s) and reroll the Q on her third roll. The last die comes up 10 – success! Alice ends her turn with K-K-K-10-10, which is a full house.
Lucas goes next, needing to beat a full house. He rolls all five and gets Q, J, 10, 9, 9. That’s a pair of 9s. He keeps the 9-9 and rerolls the other three dice. In his second roll, he gets 9, J, Q. Now Lucas has three 9s and some high cards. He has one roll left. To beat Alice’s full house, Lucas might try for four of a kind 9s or another full house. He decides to keep the three 9s and reroll the other two dice, hoping one of them lands as a 9 (for four of a kind) or they both match each other for a full house. His final roll gives 9 and K – he hit a fourth 9! Lucas ends with 9-9-9-9-K, which is four of a kind (four 9s). That beats Alice’s full house.
Outcome: Lucas’s four of a kind wins the round, taking the pot. If it were just for points, Lucas would score the win for this round. If more players were in the game, each would take their turn trying to beat the best hand so far. If someone ties exactly with the best hand, you’d handle the tie (more on ties below). Otherwise, the highest hand wins.
Scoring in Poker Dice is all about recognising the poker hand rankings made with dice. These are all the possible five-dice hands from highest to lowest.
It may be obvious, but if you get a high straight and your opponent has a low straight, then you’d win, as a high straight outranks a low straight. Any other combination of five distinct values is not a complete straight (it will have a gap and be just a “bust” high-card hand).
No Flushes: As mentioned, there are no suit-based hands in basic Poker Dice. You can ignore any thought of flushes or straight flushes – those hands simply can’t occur without suits. The dice often have suits printed on them (for aesthetics or differentiation), but they don’t affect gameplay unless you’re using some particular variant of the game.
Ties: In the rare case of an exact tie (same category and same values, e.g. both players have K-K-K-Q-Q full house), you can either have those players roll all five dice again in a tiebreaker round, or just split the pot if gambling. Most casual games just do a quick tiebreaker re-roll between the tied players to determine a clear winner.
With scoring understood, let’s move on to some basic strategies to improve your odds of winning. While Poker Dice is a game of chance, there’s strategy in which dice you choose to keep or reroll. As a beginner, the key is to maximise your chance of ending with a strong hand while minimising risk.
Always keep valuable combos. This might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how greedy some players can get in the heat of the moment. Generally, if you roll any decent combination on your first throw (a pair or better), hold onto it. Keep that pair, three of a kind, etc., and use your remaining rolls to improve it. If you get two 10s, keep the 10-10. If you get three of a kind, definitely keep those three.
From there, you need to chase the right improvements.
With a pair, you might aim for two pairs, three of a kind, or even four of a kind. So on the next roll, you’d reroll the other three dice. If that next roll gives you another of that same value, great – you have three of a kind. If it gives you a different pair, that’s good too – now you have two pairs. Keep both pairs, and on the final roll try to get one of those pairs to turn into a full house or four of a kind.
With two pairs on your first or second roll, you have a choice: you can keep both pairs and just roll the one remaining die to try for a full house (hoping that die matches one of your pairs). Or, a riskier move, you could throw away one of the pairs and roll two dice, trying to turn your remaining pair into four of a kind or get a different improvement.
With three of a kind, it’s often wise to hold all three and roll the other two dice. You’re hoping to either pair up one of the remaining two to make a full house or hit the fourth of your trio to get a four of a kind.
With four of a kind already (lucky you!), definitely keep the four. You have one die to play with. Usually, you’ll just roll that one die and see if by a miracle you get five of a kind. If not, you still have your four of a kind. If you’re playing the horses variant and the four-kind is Aces and you’re afraid of rolling that fifth Ace… well, that’s a very specific and pretty risky scenario, so be careful!
With a straight on an early roll, you might want to stop right there. Since straights are hard to get, keeping it is usually wise – you can try and improve to a full house or four of a kind by breaking the straight, but that’s a big gamble.
What if you roll nothing good, no pairs at all? You have five unrelated values (a bust) on your first roll. In this case, some players choose to hold their highest card, like an Ace or King, as a slight safeguard and reroll the other four. Others will just wipe the board and reroll all five dice, since keeping a single high card only marginally improves your odds of at least pairing it.
There’s no strong consensus here. If that Ace is the only thing you have, you might keep it. Generally, we’d say not to get too attached to a lone high card – it’s often better to just roll everything and try for a real hand.
With practice, you’ll get a feel for when to take a risk by rerolling something you’d normally keep. But as a beginner, err on the side of keeping any definite hand and just try to build on it.
Now that you’ve got the strategy down, let’s look at some popular variants of Poker Dice, including some we’ve hinted at, and other versions that use different dice.
In this version, each player rolls their five dice in secret, usually hiding them under a cup or behind a screen. You then take turns announcing what hand you have – or say you have. You can lie about it, hence the name. The next player has two choices:
In a two-player liar’s dice, it can be simplified: Player A announces a hand, Player B either tries to roll a better hand or calls A’s bluff immediately. If B tries to beat it, then A can call B’s bluff, etc., until someone calls. This variant is all about reading your opponent and gutsy bluffing. It’s less about the dice probability and more about good old mind tricks.
There’s also the more common version of Liar’s Dice played with multiple standard dice. Usually each player has 5 dice and the players bet on the quantity of pips. There’s a scene in Pirates of the Caribbean where Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) challenges Captain Davy Jones to this game! But this is a different game altogether, though related in spirit. The Poker Dice variant of Liar’s Dice specifically uses poker hands as the basis for bluffing.
Spanish Poker Dice uses eight-sided dice (d8s) instead of the usual six-sided. These eight-sided dice are marked with: Ace, King, Queen, Jack, 10, 9, 8, 7. So effectively, you have two extra ranks (7 and 8) in play. This allows for more possible straights, as you can now get sequences like 7-8-9-10-J or 8-9-10-J-Q. With eight-sided dice, hand probabilities will also shift. Getting five of a kind is even rarer now.
Unless you have a set of 8-sided poker dice, you probably won’t encounter this variant often. It’s more of a collector’s or niche item. But it’s a neat way to play if you want to just change up the odds.
We touched on this in the rules section, but to recap: Horses is a variant where a five-aces hand (which would normally be the best hand possible) is turned on its head to be the worst one. If you roll five aces, you automatically lose.
If you do play with Horses rule, you can imagine the drama: someone shouts in joy, “Five aces!… oh nooooo.” Meanwhile, four of a kind would suddenly be the effective top hand, because no one in their right mind would want to roll that fifth ace. Strategy-wise, if you were aware of this rule, you might actually not reroll for a fifth ace if you already had four aces.
Again, this is a lighthearted variant – use it if you want to wreak some chaos in your game.
One of the most famous appearances of Poker Dice in video games is in The Witcher series, which includes a mini-game called Dice Poker where you gamble with NPCs by playing poker with dice. This has actually introduced a lot of gamers to the concept of Poker Dice, even if they didn’t know it was a real game. If you enjoyed it in The Witcher, now you know how to play it on your tabletop!
If you want to play online, websites like Board Game Arena or Tabletopia offer Poker Dice in their catalogue. These automate the dice rolling and can handle scoring for you. It’s a convenient way to play if friends are far away.
Search your app store for “Poker Dice” or “Yatzy” (since Yahtzee-like games overlap) and you’ll find a few apps that let you play a version of Poker Dice. Some are single-player, others offer pass-and-play or online matchmaking.
No matter the format, the core idea remains: roll the dice, make poker hands, win. The game’s simplicity is a big part of its charm.
If even after checking the kicker your hands are a perfect tie, you can either split the pot or have a tiebreaker reroll. Most friendly games just reroll.
Yes! You can practice building hands by yourself, try to beat your own high scores, or use mobile apps for solo play. It’s a good way to get faster at evaluating hands.
It is! Poker Dice uses the same hand rankings as card poker, but without suits. So no flushes or royal flushes, and five of a kind becomes the top hand.
Five of a kind is the highest hand you can roll, with five Aces being the best of all. If you’re playing the “horses” variant, five Aces actually becomes the worst!
The game emerged in the 19th century in the United States. This was around the same time that modern poker (with cards) was spreading in riverboats and saloons, especially in New Orleans, a hotbed of gambling activity.
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