About this weblog

Rankplan is a weblog about the arithmetic underneath card and table games. It is written entry by entry rather than as a guide, and each post takes a single question and works through it at the length that question needs.

The recurring subject is pricing: how a payout schedule and a set of rules combine into an expected result, and why two games that feel similar can be priced quite differently. Hand rankings, drawing rules, pocket counts and commissions all turn out to be the same kind of object once you look at how they are derived.

What is here

Entries are grouped by the day they were published and filed under four headings: card games, table games, odds and probability, and bankroll. The archive lists everything in date order, and the glossary defines the terms that recur so individual entries can stay short.

What is not here

There are no reviews, no ratings, no comparisons of operators and no recommendations of anywhere to play. Nothing here is advice about whether to play or how much to stake. The entries describe how games are priced, which is a narrower subject than it is sometimes taken to be.

Figures quoted in the entries are general mathematical properties of the games described, derived from stated rule sets. Where a rule set changes, the figure changes with it, and the entries try to say so rather than presenting a number as fixed.