Play Twenty-Six Online

What Is Twenty-Six?

Twenty-Six is the dice game of the Chicago tavern. You pick a point number, pay a stake, and throw ten dice thirteen times. Every time one of the dice shows your point, a tally mark goes on the sheet. When the thirteenth throw is done there are 130 dice worth of results, and the count decides everything: reach 26 or more and you win, land on exactly 13 or 10 or fewer and you also win, and any other tally, including all the ordinary ones in the low twenties, loses.

There is not a single decision to make once the dice start moving. What Twenty-Six offers instead is suspense over a long count, a beautifully clear lesson in how the binomial distribution behaves, and a house edge so large that the game only ever made sense when the prize was a free drink. It belongs with the other counter and tavern games on Dice.now, Chuck-a-Luck and Sic Bo, rather than with the decision games, and the tally-sheet feel will be familiar to anyone who has played Bunco.

A Short History of Twenty-Six

Twenty-Six, or simply “26,” was played in the Midwest of the United States from the 1920s through the 1950s, and nowhere more than in Chicago. Local histories trace the game back to the 1910s, but its boom came after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, when taverns reopened legally and needed a reason for customers to stay at the bar. A 26 table answered that need. The game was cheap to run, a cup, ten dice and a printed tally sheet, and the payoff was in drinks or trade, so no cash changed hands in a way that obviously broke the gambling laws.

The tables were run by the 26 girls, young women hired to shake the cup, keep the tally and sell drinks, and chosen, the newspapers of the time made clear, largely for their looks. At the peak, according to Chicago local-history accounts, more than 5,000 were employed across the city’s taverns, cigar stores and hotel bars. Even the Palmer House, the grandest hotel in the Loop, had a 26 table, and the Playboy Club kept one into the 1960s. The ante was typically a quarter and the prize for making 26 was a drink on the house, from which the winner was expected to tip the girl. Some establishments paid in chips redeemable at the bar, which let the house set its own exchange rate.

Twenty-Six never enjoyed settled legal status. City ordinances aimed at gambling in places that sold liquor were passed and ignored, the Illinois Liquor Control Commission tried to close the tables in the 1940s, and the police reserved the right to shut any tavern they considered a public nuisance, but for most of two decades enforcement was light. The end came with the local and federal anti-gambling drives of the 1950s, which closed down most of the tables, and Chicago finally outlawed the game outright in 1962 according to local accounts. Encyclopedic descriptions of the game put the house advantage at about 18 percent, which is close to the figure our own arithmetic produces below. A handful of bars kept a 26 sheet under the counter for years afterward, and a “26 girl” remained a Chicago phrase long after the last cup was put away.

Twenty-Six Rules

Equipment

• Ten six-sided dice and a cup to throw them from
• A tally sheet with thirteen lines, one per throw
• Chips or drinks to bet with; our game starts you with 1,000 free chips

Object

Throw your chosen point number 26 or more times in thirteen throws of ten dice. Exactly 13 and 10 or fewer also win, as consolation results for a spectacularly unlucky count.

How a Turn Works

1. Choose a point. Name any number from 1 to 6. It stays your point for the whole game.
2. Place your bet. In our game the choices are 10, 25, 50 or 100 chips.
3. Throw the ten dice. Count the dice showing your point and record the number on line one of the tally sheet.
4. Repeat for thirteen throws in total. After each throw add the hits to the running tally.
5. Settle. Compare the final tally with the payout table. Winning tallies are paid at once; every other tally loses the stake.

Payout Table

Payouts are quoted for 1, as they were on the tavern boards: a win returns the multiple of your stake and the stake itself is not returned separately. “4 for 1” is therefore a profit of 3 times the bet.

Worked Examples

• Point 6, throws of 2, 1, 3, 2, 0, 4, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3. The tally is 26 exactly. That is a win at 4 for 1; a 25-chip bet returns 100, a profit of 75.
• Point 3, throws of 1, 2, 2, 1, 3, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1. The tally is 21, one short of the average and five short of the target. The bet is lost. This is the most common kind of result: tallies of 20 to 23 together make up about 36% of all games.
• Point 1, throws of 0, 1, 0, 1, 2, 1, 1, 0, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1. The tally is 13. The “unlucky 13” pays 4 for 1, the same as a 26.
• Point 5, throws of 4, 3, 2, 3, 2, 4, 1, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2. A tally of 34, which happens well under one game in a hundred, pays 8 for 1: a 50-chip bet returns 400.
• Point 2, throws of 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 2, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 2. The tally is 9. Ten or fewer pays 4 for 1. It is the rarest win in the game, about one in 440.
• Point 4, throws that reach 25 after throw twelve, and then a blank thirteenth throw. The tally is 25, one short. It loses, and there is nothing to be done about it; there is no extra throw and no partial payout. This is the throw the 26 girls were paid to make you feel.

The Odds Behind Twenty-Six

The binomial count

Each of the 130 dice you throw shows your point with probability 1/6, independently of every other die. The tally is therefore a binomial random variable with n = 130 trials and p = 1/6:

• Mean: 130 × 1/6 = 21.67 hits
• Standard deviation: √(130 × 1/6 × 5/6) = 4.25 hits

A 26 sits about one standard deviation above the mean, which is why it feels reachable and is not. The exact probabilities of the tallies that matter:

The house edge

Multiply each winning probability by its “for 1” payout and add them up: 0.1746 × 4 + 0.0075 × 8 + 0.0109 × 4 + 0.0023 × 4 = 0.811. For every chip you stake you get back, on average, 0.81 of a chip, a house edge of 18.9%. That is the figure behind the “about 18 percent” quoted for the tavern game, and it explains why the taverns could afford to hire 5,000 women to run the tables.

Two details of the schedule move the edge:

Note the difference between “4 for 1” and “4 to 1.” If the same tallies were paid 4 to 1, with the stake returned on top of the winnings, the total return would be about 1.006 per chip and the player would have a tiny edge. No tavern ever ran the game that way, and quoting the odds “for 1” was how the boards hid a fifth of every quarter.

Twenty-Six Strategy

1. Understand that there is no strategy inside the game

Once the point is chosen and the bet is down, nothing you do changes the odds. All ten dice are thrown every time, all thirteen throws are made, and every die is independent. Twenty-Six is a wager on a distribution, not a game of skill, so the only decisions are whether to play, how much, and when to stop.

2. The point number is irrelevant

Ones, threes and sixes all show with probability 1/6. A number that “has been coming up all night” is exactly as likely as any other on the next throw. Pick a favorite for fun and never pay for the privilege.

3. Know the real target: one standard deviation

The tally averages 21.67 and moves about 4.25 either way. Reaching 26 means beating the average by a full deviation, which happens 18% of the time; reaching 33 means beating it by nearly three, which happens under 1% of the time. Do not budget for the 8 for 1 payout. It is decoration.

4. Bet the minimum, and bet it for the show

With an 18.9% edge every chip staked costs an average of nearly a fifth of its value. A 10-chip game costs you about 1.9 chips on average; a 100-chip game costs about 19. The thirteen-throw drama is the same at either stake, so the small bet buys the same entertainment for a fifth of the price.

5. Do not chase a near miss

A tally of 25 feels like proof that the next game will get there. It is not. The next game starts again from zero with the same 18.2% chance of 26 or more. The near miss is the game’s most effective sales device, which is exactly why the 26 girls were told to sympathize warmly and shake the cup for you again.

6. Set a stopping rule before you start

Decide in advance how many games you will play or how many chips you are willing to lose, and stop there. A short session at 25 chips a game with a 100-chip limit is a reasonable evening; the bankroll will last about twenty games on average, and there is roughly a one-in-five chance of a win in any of them.

7. Use the tally sheet to learn, not to predict

The sheet shows how ten dice usually behave: one or two hits on most throws, a 4 or 5 now and then, an occasional blank. After a few games you will have an intuitive feel for a binomial spread that no textbook chart gives you. That is the lasting value of Twenty-Six, and it is free.

Common Mistakes

• Paying attention to hot numbers. The dice have no memory; every point is 1 in 6.
• Reading “4 for 1” as “4 to 1.” It is one unit less. A winning 25-chip bet returns 100, not 125.
• Assuming 26 is roughly a coin flip. It is under one chance in five, and the whole winning zone is under one in five.
• Betting more after a 24 or 25. Nothing carries over between games.
• Treating the 33 payout as part of the plan. It arrives once in 134 games.
• Forgetting the consolation tallies. Exactly 13 and 10 or fewer are wins. Many players do not know it and, in the taverns, some houses quietly relied on that.

Variants and House Rules

• Sliding scale. Some boards paid 4 for 1 on 26, 5 on 27, 6 on 28, 8 on 29 and 10 on 30 or more, with 13 at 5 for 1 and 10 or fewer at 10 for 1. Under that schedule the game would actually favor the player, which suggests either the payoffs were in inflated drink prices or the printed boards were more generous than the taverns that used them. We use the flat schedule.
• Thirteen at 2 for 1. A common downgrade; it raises the edge to about 21%.
• Thirty-three at 10 for 1. A common upgrade; it lowers the edge to about 17%.
• Point chosen after the first throw. A relative called Fourteens let the player nominate the point after seeing the first throw, usually requiring three of a kind or better on that throw, and paid a flat 8 for 1 on hitting a target count.
• Drinks, not chips. The original prize was a drink or a bar token. In some places a 26 earned a “double drink” and 33 earned a bottle.
• Cash games. Twenty-Six was occasionally banked for money at store counters. At 4 for 1 on a quarter ante the house kept, on average, a nickel of every quarter.

If you like counting hits over many dice, Bunco is the party version with three dice and a target that changes every round, and Chicago turns the same idea into an eleven-round race with two dice. For a betting game with a small house edge, play Craps and stick to the Pass Line.

Glossary

• Point: The number from 1 to 6 you are counting.
• Throw: One cast of all ten dice; a game is thirteen throws.
• Tally: The running count of dice showing your point.
• 26: The target tally, and the name of the game.
• For 1: A payout that includes your stake; “4 for 1” is a profit of 3 to 1.
• 26 girl: The tavern employee who ran the table and kept the sheet.
• Binomial distribution: The probability law of the tally: 130 independent chances, each 1 in 6.
• House edge: The share of each stake the house keeps on average, about 18.9% here.

Play Twenty-Six Online on Dice.now

The game at the top of this page is tavern Twenty-Six with free chips only: no real money, no account and nothing to download. You start with 1,000 chips. Click one of the six dice to choose your point, pick a bet of 10, 25, 50 or 100 with the chip buttons, and press Throw 13 times. The ten dice then throw themselves thirteen times in a row, with each throw animated and any dice showing your point highlighted in green, while the tally sheet fills in one line per throw with the faces, the hits and the running total. The status bar shows your bankroll, your point, the tally so far and your best bankroll.

When the thirteenth throw lands, the tally is settled against the schedule above, paid for 1: 26 to 32 returns 4 times the bet, 33 or more returns 8 times, and exactly 13 or 10 or fewer return 4 times; everything else loses the stake. The payout table beside the sheet lists the exact probability of each result along with the expected tally of 21.67 and the 18.9% house edge, so you always know what you are buying. Cash out ends the session and records your bankroll; if you cannot cover the minimum bet the session ends automatically, and Play Again restores 1,000 chips. The dice use your browser’s cryptographic random number generator, and your best bankroll is stored only on your device. Pick a point and throw.