Play Aces in the Pot Online

What Is Aces in the Pot?

Aces in the Pot is a traditional dice game of pure chance for four or more players, played with two ordinary dice and a handful of chips. Everyone starts with two chips. On your turn you roll both dice: every 1, which dice players have called an ace for centuries, costs you a chip to the pot in the middle of the table, and every 6 sends a chip to the player on your left. Fours, threes, twos and fives do nothing at all. Chips drift around the table and, one ace at a time, into the pot, until only one player still has any. That player then faces the game’s signature moment: three throws of the dice, and a single 6 in any of them passes the chip on to the next player, who gets three throws of their own.

There are no choices in Aces in the Pot. You cannot hold dice, you cannot pass, you cannot bet on a particular player. What you get instead is a game that a child can learn from one demonstration, that takes about five minutes with four people, and that produces a genuine cliff-hanger at the end when the whole table watches one person try to throw the dice three times without a 6.

If you have played Left Center Right you already know the shape of this game: LCR is essentially Aces in the Pot with custom dice and a third direction for chips to travel. If you like the number-ownership idea of chip games, Help Your Neighbor is the other classic in the family, and for a large-group evening Bunco is the natural companion.

A Short History of Aces in the Pot

The honest answer is that nobody knows who invented Aces in the Pot or when. It belongs to the same layer of folk dice games as Drop Dead and Sevens Out: games that were played in pubs, kitchens and army barracks long before anyone wrote them down, and that survive today in rules collections rather than in a publisher’s catalog. The British hobby site dice-play.com, one of the most thorough online archives of traditional dice games, lists it as a game “best played with at least four players” and records the traditional table cries Aces in the Pot for a double 1 and Sixes to the Side for a double 6. Those chants are the best clue we have to the game’s age: they sound like the patter of a Victorian or Edwardian parlor, but we could not find a dated printed source, so treat any claim about a specific century as folklore.

What is well documented is the game’s most famous descendant. Left Center Right was first sold by George & Company of Buffalo, New York in 1983, and from 1992 the company marketed it exclusively as LCR. Those dates come from a 2009 United States Court of Appeals decision in a trademark dispute over the game, and the same ruling noted that the underlying pass-your-chips dice game is old and in the public domain. Aces in the Pot is the most commonly cited example of that older public-domain game, and it is easy to see the lineage: LCR keeps the “pass to a neighbor” and “pay the pot” outcomes, adds a second neighbor, swaps the pip dice for custom L, C and R dice, and drops the three-throw finale. Whether LCR’s creators were consciously adapting Aces in the Pot or simply reinventing a common idea is not recorded anywhere we could find, so we present the relationship as a strong family resemblance rather than a proven parentage.

The word ace for the one-pip face is itself a piece of dice history. It comes through Old French from the Latin as, a unit or single thing, and was the standard name for the 1 on a die before it migrated to playing cards. Games that punish aces, from Drop Dead to the crapping-out rules of Hazard, are among the oldest in the dice repertoire.

Aces in the Pot Rules

Equipment

• Two standard six-sided dice.
• Chips. Two per player is the traditional count. Coins, matchsticks, buttons or candy all work, and if you play with coins the pot becomes a small prize.
• Four or more players. The game works with three, but four to eight is the sweet spot because chips need enough seats to travel around before they run out.

Object

Be the player who holds the last chips in play, and then throw the dice three times in a row without a 6. Do that and you win everything in the pot.

How a Turn Works

1. Check your chips. If you have none, you do not roll. Play passes to your left and you wait for a chip to arrive.
2. Roll both dice.
3. Resolve each die in turn. - A 1 (ace) puts one of your chips in the pot. A double 1, aces in the pot, costs two chips. - A 6 passes one of your chips to the player on your left. A double 6, sixes to the side, passes two. - Any other face does nothing. - You can never pay more than you hold. If you have one chip and throw a 1 and a 6, only the first die counts.
4. Pass the dice to the left.

Play continues until only one player holds chips. In practice, because eight chips are in play and the pot only grows, that almost always means exactly one chip is left outside the pot.

The Final Throws

When a single player holds all the chips still in play, normal rules stop and the finale begins:

1. That player throws both dice up to three times, and the only thing that matters is whether a 6 appears. Aces are ignored in this phase.
2. Three throws with no 6 win the game. The player collects the pot and keeps whatever chips they were holding.
3. A 6 on any throw passes one chip to the left for each 6 shown, and the count resets. If the neighbor now holds the only chips, the neighbor starts three throws of their own. If two players hold chips again, which can only happen when the final player had more than one chip, normal play resumes with the neighbor rolling next.

The finale can circle the table several times before somebody survives all three throws, and that suspense is the whole reason the game has lasted.

Outcomes of a Normal Roll

Worked Examples

Example 1: a quiet opening. Four players, everyone on two chips. You roll 3 and 5. Nothing happens; you still hold two chips and the dice go to Ana on your left.

Example 2: a bad roll. Ana rolls 1 and 6. The ace sends one of her chips to the pot and the 6 passes her other chip to Ben. Ana now has none, the pot has one, and Ben has three. Ana will skip her turns until Cara, on her right, throws a 6.

Example 3: paying with an empty hand. Later, Ben holds one chip and rolls 6 and 1. The dice are read in order: the 6 passes his only chip to Cara, and the 1 has nothing left to take. Had the dice been read the other way round, the chip would have gone to the pot instead. Groups that care about this usually agree in advance to read the dice left to right as they lie, which is what our version does.

Example 4: the finale begins. After a dozen turns the pot holds seven chips and Cara has the last one. She throws 2 and 4: safe, one of three. She throws 5 and 5: safe, two of three. She throws 6 and 3: a 6. The chip passes to you on her left, and now you start your own three throws.

Example 5: winning the pot. You throw 1 and 1. In the finale aces mean nothing, so that is a safe throw. Then 4 and 2, then 3 and 3. Three throws, no 6: you take the seven chips from the pot plus the one in your hand, a total of eight from a game that started with eight on the table.

The Odds in Aces in the Pot

Every die you roll has a 1 in 6 chance of showing an ace, a 1 in 6 chance of showing a 6, and a 4 in 6 chance of doing nothing. From those three numbers the whole game follows.

• Chance of at least one ace on two dice: 11 in 36, or 30.6%. The chance of no ace is 25/36, and 1 − 25/36 = 11/36.
• Chance of at least one 6: also 11 in 36.
• Chance that something happens: 20 in 36, or 55.6%. Only 16 of the 36 combinations leave your chips untouched.
• Chance of losing two chips in one roll: 4 in 36, or 11.1% (1-1, 6-6, 1-6 and 6-1).
• Expected chips leaving your hand per roll: two-thirds of a chip, one-third to the pot and one-third to your left neighbor, as long as you hold at least two.
• Expected pot growth per roll: one-third of a chip, so a four-player round of four rolls adds about 1.3 chips to the pot and the eight starting chips last roughly six rounds.

The final throws

The finale is a simple repeated trial. One throw of two dice shows no 6 with probability 25/36 ≈ 69.4%. Three in a row:

So each attempt succeeds about one time in three and the chip is expected to change hands about twice before the game ends. Because the first player to attempt always gets the first shot, they have an edge: in our simulation of 20,000 four-player games the player who first became the sole chip-holder went on to win 51% of the time, with the remaining 49% split among the three others in decreasing order around the table. The same simulation produced an average game of 33 turns (counting the skipped turns of empty-handed players), about 6.5 throws in the final phase, and a longest game of just under a hundred turns.

Aces in the Pot Strategy

There is no decision to make in Aces in the Pot, so there is no strategy in the usual sense. What there is instead is a set of things worth knowing before you sit down, especially if money or pride is on the table.

1. Understand what “no chips” really means

Losing both chips early feels like elimination, but it is not. As long as the player on your right holds chips, they send you one on 11 of every 36 rolls, so on average you are back in the game within about three of their turns. Never leave the table, and never let a group declare you out.

2. Sit to the left of the biggest stack

Chips move in only one direction, so the player to the left of whoever holds the most chips is the most likely to receive some. If your group picks seats before dealing out chips there is nothing to exploit, but if you join a game in progress, the seat to the left of the leader is the one to take.

3. Do not read anything into a hot streak

A 44% chance of a blank roll means runs of three or four quiet turns are common and mean nothing. Every roll resets the odds. The player who “always seems to roll aces” is just the one you remember.

4. Expect the finale to go around the table

Only one attempt in three succeeds, so the last chip usually visits at least two players before someone wins. If you are watching an opponent start their throws, you still have roughly a one-in-four to one-in-five chance of winning the pot yourself. Do not concede early.

5. Agree on the dice order before anyone rolls

The only real rules ambiguity in the game is what happens when you throw a 1 and a 6 while holding a single chip. Read left to right, or ace first, or six first: any of them works, but decide before it matters, because the chip either vanishes into the pot or lands with your neighbor, and those are very different outcomes for the table.

6. Keep the stakes small if you play for coins

With two chips each, the winner of a four-player game takes the pot of seven plus their own chip, while the three losers are each out two. At a dollar a chip that is a swing of a few dollars, which is fine among friends; at higher stakes the game’s total randomness starts to feel unpleasant.

7. Use it as a warm-up or a tie-breaker

Aces in the Pot runs five minutes and needs no explanation, which makes it ideal for the first ten minutes of a game night while people are still arriving, or for settling who goes first in a longer game. When the group wants a decision to make, move on to Pig or Farkle.

Common Mistakes

• Making the ace the bad face in the finale. The traditional rule is three throws without a 6. Aces are ignored, because otherwise the last chip would disappear into the pot and nobody could win it. Some families play it the other way round; fine as a house rule, but not the standard.
• Ending the game as soon as one player holds all the chips. Holding the last chips does not win. The three-throw finale still has to be survived, and it fails two times in three.
• Passing chips to the right. Sixes go to the left, the same direction the dice travel. In a game where chips only move one way, getting the direction wrong changes who is favored.
• Paying more than you hold. With one chip and a double 1, you pay one chip, not two. Debts do not exist in this game.
• Removing empty-handed players from the table. They still take a seat and still receive chips from the right. Skipping them permanently ruins the game’s balance.

Variants and House Rules

• Reversed faces. Some groups swap the roles of the two scoring faces, paying the pot on sixes and passing to the left on aces. The odds are unchanged; only the table chant differs.
• Ace finale. The final player must avoid a 1 rather than a 6, with sixes ignored. The odds are identical (25/36 per throw), so this changes flavor rather than fairness.
• More chips. Three or four chips each lengthens the game and makes the mid-game, where several players trade chips back and forth, last longer. It also makes the multi-chip finale more common.
• Pass to the right. Sending sixes clockwise instead of counter-clockwise, or alternating direction each round, is a simple way to stop the same neighbor benefiting from your bad luck every game.
• One finale only. A quicker ending: if the final player throws a 6, the game simply ends and the neighbor who receives the chip wins the pot without throwing. It removes the suspense but cuts a minute off the game.
• Betting. Play with coins or set a stake per chip. Because the finale is so swingy, some groups also let the last player buy an extra throw by adding a coin to the pot before they start.

Glossary

• Ace: The 1 face of a die. In normal play it sends one of your chips to the pot.
• Aces in the pot: The traditional call for a double 1, costing two chips.
• Sixes to the side: The call for a double 6, passing two chips to the left.
• Pot: The chips in the middle of the table. They never return to play until somebody wins them.
• Sole holder: The only player still holding chips, who must attempt the final throws.
• Final throws: The up-to-three throws the sole holder makes; a 6 on any of them passes a chip to the left.
• Safe throw: A throw in the finale with no 6 on either die.
• Skipped turn: A turn passed over because the player has no chips.

Play Aces in the Pot Online on Dice.now

The game at the top of this page follows the traditional rules exactly as described above. You sit at a four-seat table with three computer players, Ana on your left, Ben across from you and Cara on your right, and everyone starts with two chips. On your turn you press Roll and two dice are rolled using your browser’s cryptographic random number generator. Every 1 moves one of your chips to the pot, every 6 moves one to Ana on your left, and the dice are read left to right, so with a single chip only the first scoring die counts. The table shows every seat’s chips and the pot, and the log records each roll and transfer. Players with no chips are skipped but stay at the table. Computer players roll on their own with short pauses; switch on Auto-play and your seat rolls itself too.

As soon as one player holds every chip still in play the finale starts: the tracker under the dice shows how many safe throws that player has made, the Roll button becomes Throw 1 of 3, and aces are ignored. A 6 passes a chip to the left and hands the attempt to the neighbor; three clean throws end the game, the winner takes the pot, and your wins, games played and biggest pot won are saved on your device only. Ready to try for three throws without a 6? Roll the dice.