Bầu cua tôm cá — also called bầu cua cá cọp — is the three-dice game Vietnamese families play at Tết. This guide covers the six symbols on the board, the rules and payouts, why the game is named after a tiger that is not on the board, and the part most guides leave out: the real probabilities and the 7.87% house edge, worked out in full. It also lists the online casinos that offer the game for real money.
Our editors have found and reviewed reputable online casinos that offer Bầu Cua Tôm Cá in Vietnam. The gaming platforms listed below allow Vietnamese players to place real money bets on Bau Cau and other online casino games. Some of these operators also present welcome bonuses for new players and thrilling offers for existing customers. Compare the casinos listed below to learn more about playing Bầu Cua online.
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Bầu cua is a Vietnamese dice game played with three six-sided dice and a board of six picture squares. Players put money on the squares they think will come up; the dealer shakes the three dice under a bowl, lifts it, and pays out every square whose picture is showing.
The game goes by two names in English, which is why searches for it split in two. Bầu cua tôm cá means “gourd–crab–shrimp–fish”, and bầu cua cá cọp means “gourd–crab–fish–tiger”. Both refer to the same game. It is also called lắc bầu cua (“shaking bầu cua”) after the bowl-shaking that starts each round, and it is most strongly associated with Tết, the Lunar New Year, when it comes out at family gatherings across Vietnam and in Vietnamese communities abroad.
It is a pure game of chance. The dice decide everything; no amount of skill, experience or bet arrangement changes what they show.
A Vietnamese bầu cua board carries six symbols, normally laid out in two rows of three. Each of the three dice carries all six, one per face.
| Vietnamese | English | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Bầu | Gourd (calabash) | The bottle gourd that gives the game the first half of its name. |
| Cua | Crab | Usually drawn in blue. |
| Tôm | Shrimp (prawn) | The tôm of “bầu cua tôm cá”. |
| Cá | Fish | The cá of both names. |
| Gà | Rooster (cockerel) | Sometimes described as a chicken. |
| Nai | Deer (stag) | The sixth square on a Vietnamese board — not a tiger. |
Because every symbol appears exactly once on every die, no square is more likely to come up than any other. That single fact is worth holding on to before reading any advice about “picking the right square”.
The set changes from country to country. The Chinese version, Hoo Hey How (魚蝦蟹, “fish–prawn–crab”), replaces the deer with a coin. Thai boards carry a tiger. The Cambodian game Klah Klok uses a deer, as Vietnam does. Gourd, crab, shrimp and fish turn up in nearly every version.
This is the question the game’s English name raises most often, and it deserves an honest answer: it is still argued over, and there is no settled explanation. A Vietnamese board has a deer (nai) in the sixth square, not a tiger (cọp), yet “bầu cua cá cọp” remains a common name for it.
Vietnamese sources generally offer three suggestions:
All three are widely repeated hypotheses rather than established fact. We set them out so you can weigh them; we are not claiming any one of them is correct.
A round is short and the sequence never varies:
There is no limit on how many people can play, and one player may cover several squares in the same round.
Payouts depend on how many dice show your symbol — not merely on whether it appeared at all. This is the part casual players most often get wrong.
| Dice showing your symbol | Payout | You get back on a 100 stake |
|---|---|---|
| None | Lose the stake | 0 |
| One | 1:1 | 200 (100 stake + 100) |
| Two | 2:1 | 300 (100 stake + 200) |
| Three | 3:1 | 400 (100 stake + 300) |
A winning square returns your stake plus the payout. Put 100 on the crab and two dice come up crab: you get your 100 back and 200 on top.
These are the usual odds, but they are a convention rather than a rule — some tables pay less. Ask how a table pays before you put money down.
Three dice with six faces each give 6 × 6 × 6 = 216 possible outcomes. For any one symbol you pick, those 216 outcomes divide as follows.
| Result for one chosen symbol | Combinations | Probability |
|---|---|---|
| It does not appear (you lose) | 5 × 5 × 5 = 125 | 57.87% |
| It appears on exactly one die | 3 × 5 × 5 = 75 | 34.72% |
| It appears on exactly two dice | 3 × 5 = 15 | 6.94% |
| It appears on all three dice | 1 | 0.46% |
| Total | 216 | 100% |
The counts add to 216 exactly, which is the arithmetic check. The first thing they show is this: the chance that your symbol appears at all is 75 + 15 + 1 = 91 out of 216, about 42%. Bầu cua looks easy to win because six symbols and three dice feel generous, but you lose the majority of the rounds you bet on.
Put the payouts and the probabilities together and the game’s cost falls out of the arithmetic. Staking 1 unit on one square across all 216 outcomes:
(+1 × 75) + (+2 × 15) + (+3 × 1) − (1 × 125) = 75 + 30 + 3 − 125 = −17
Divided across 216 rounds, that is −17/216 ≈ −7.87%. Over the long run a player loses roughly 7.87 units for every 100 staked. That is the house edge, and it is built into the payout table — it is not the dealer cheating. For comparison, it sits well above the edge on baccarat or blackjack and roughly in line with American roulette.
The 7.87% figure assumes the standard 1:1 / 2:1 / 3:1 payouts above. A table that pays less than that costs the player more.
The 7.87% is the gap between what the game pays and what the outcomes are worth. That invites the obvious question, which almost nothing written about this game answers: what would the table have to pay for the bet to break even?
Keep the one-die payout at the game’s own 1:1 and solve for the other two, so that the winning outcomes exactly cover the 125 losing ones:
(75 × 1) + (15 × a) + (1 × b) = 125
In non-negative whole numbers that has four solutions — (a, b) = (0, 50), (1, 35), (2, 20) and (3, 5) — and only the last keeps both payouts anywhere near a real pay table. So 1:1 / 3:1 / 5:1 is a break-even table: 75 + 45 + 5 = 125, exactly. The game pays 1:1 / 2:1 / 3:1.
There is a cleaner way to see where the margin sits, and it does not depend on picking one break-even table over another. Adding one unit to a tier’s payout removes exactly that tier’s outcome count divided by 216 from the house edge:
| Result | Pays | Outcomes | +1 unit of payout removes |
|---|---|---|---|
| One die matches | 1:1 | 75 | 75/216 = 34.72 points |
| Two dice match | 2:1 | 15 | 15/216 = 6.94 points |
| All three match | 3:1 | 1 | 1/216 = 0.46 points |
A one-unit improvement on the two-dice result is worth exactly 15 times one on the three-dice result — and the three-dice result is the one every guide talks about, because it is the rare and dramatic one.
The practical version: a table paying 3:1 when two dice match runs at a house edge of 0.93% instead of 7.87%. A table that instead raises the three-dice payout from 3:1 all the way to 12:1 — which sounds far more generous — still leaves the edge at 3.70%. When comparing bầu cua tables, the two-dice cell is the one to read first.
A common table tactic is to put the same stake on all six squares, on the theory that something must come up. It does — and it still loses.
| The three dice show | Chance | Staking 1 on all six squares returns |
|---|---|---|
| Three different symbols | 120/216 (55.6%) | 6 — you break even |
| A pair and a single | 90/216 (41.7%) | 5 — you lose 1 |
| The same symbol three times | 6/216 (2.8%) | 4 — you lose 2 |
Averaged out, six units staked return 5.53, which is the same −7.87%. Spreading your money across the board smooths the swings; it does not remove the edge. You break even only when all three dice show different symbols, and that happens in 120 of 216 rounds.
The same goes for the other approaches players talk about. Every square carries the identical 7.87% cost, so there is no cheaper one to find. Each round is independent, so a symbol that has not appeared for ten rolls is no more likely on the eleventh. And a staking system such as the Martingale only rearranges when you bet how much — it cannot change probabilities that are fixed by the dice. Anything sold as a guaranteed bầu cua formula or a prediction app is worth nothing.
Covering all six squares is the version players talk about, but the same holds for two squares, or three. Expected value adds up, so every unit you put down carries its own −17/216 no matter which square it sits on or how many other units are on the board:
| Squares covered (1 unit each) | Expected value | Per unit staked |
|---|---|---|
| 1 square | −17/216 | −7.8704% |
| 2 squares | −34/216 | −7.8704% |
| 3 squares | −51/216 | −7.8704% |
| 4 squares | −68/216 | −7.8704% |
| 5 squares | −85/216 | −7.8704% |
| 6 squares | −102/216 | −7.8704% |
The last column never moves. Spreading a stake changes how bumpy the ride is, and nothing else.
Bầu cua uses three dice, and so does Sic Bo; xóc đĩa uses four two-sided discs. Their main bets are not priced alike:
| Game | Main bet | House edge |
|---|---|---|
| Xóc đĩa | Odd / even, 0.96:1 | 2.00% |
| Sic Bo | Small or Big | ≈2.78% |
| Bầu cua | One symbol | 7.8704% |
Two things follow. Bầu cua’s only bet costs roughly three times the cheapest bet on those tables — and on those same tables the side bets are far worse again, with Sic Bo’s specific-total bets and xóc đĩa’s all-one-colour bet running past 30%. Which bet you choose inside a game moves your cost more than which game you choose.
Bầu cua belongs to a family of picture-dice games played across Asia and, in different forms, well beyond it. The Chinese Hoo Hey How (fish–prawn–crab) is the closest relative, and the Cambodian Klah Klok is another. The British fairground game Crown and Anchor and the American chuck-a-luck run on the same three-dice, pick-a-symbol structure.
Exactly how and when the game reached Vietnam is not documented with any precision, and accounts that pin it to a particular place or group of people should be treated with caution. What is clear is that it settled into Vietnamese life as a Tết game — something brought out once a year, played for small stakes among family and neighbours, and valued more for the noise around the table than for the money. The other game that comes out at the same table is xóc đĩa, which uses four two-sided discs rather than dice — and whose best bet carries a far smaller house edge than anything on a bầu cua board.
Online, there are no physical dice. Results come from a random number generator, or from a real dealer shaking a real bowl on camera in a live casino studio. The rules and the payout table are otherwise the same, so the probabilities and the 7.87% house edge carry over unchanged.
What does change is pace and company. A software version deals rounds far faster than a family table, and it deals them to you alone — which matters, because losses accumulate at the speed of play. Most casinos that carry the game also offer a demo mode, which is the sensible way to see how a particular version handles payouts before staking anything.
Bầu cua is not the only traditional game a Vietnamese family plays together — if you want the card game most likely to be on the table, see our guide to Tien Len rules, or the full overview of Vietnamese card games and the decks they use. Vietnamese readers can find our full analysis in bầu cua tôm cá là gì.
Not every online casino that offers Bau Cua Tom Ca or any other game might be suitable for your needs. Thus, you need to choose carefully to avoid rogue operators. Our editors have done the hard work on your behalf by reviewing, rating, and approving safe Vietnamese casinos with high-quality Bau Cua Tom games. We consider the following steps to recommend reputable Bầu Cua casinos.
A positive reputation is an important factor to consider before placing bets on Bầu Cua. For this reason, we look for licensed operators who take the necessary precautions to provide a safe online gambling environment. Our editors make sure that the casinos we recommend here use HTTPS and SSL to protect your data.
Bau Cua should not be the only dice game you can play at an online casino. During our casino reviews, we ensure that the selected gaming platforms offer a wide selection of Bau Cua Tom. And players should be able to choose from other games, such as online slots and table games.
Good casinos have something for every player when it comes to bonuses and promotions. Whichever casino game you want to play, a great operator will allow you to play it with a lucrative casino bonus. The available offers should include welcome bonuses for new players and more rewarding promotions for existing customers.
The casinos listed here allow Vietnamese players to play Bầu Cua Tôm Cá and other casino games on mobile. This means you can access the game on your smartphone or tablet. The quickest option is to launch the selected Bau Cua game using your mobile browser.
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Bầu Cua Tôm Cá is an exciting gambling game to play, even as a new player. Many players in Vietnam like it for cultural reasons, but it has also attracted the attention of other gamblers. Once you've familiarized yourself with the rules, an enjoyable gameplay experience awaits. You can decide if you want to play by considering the pros and cons. Have a look at the key points highlighted below before playing.
The internet version of Bầu Cua Tôm Cá is easy to play at online casinos. This game can be played on a smartphone, tablet, or computer. With a clear understanding of the rules, you can start rolling the dice and perhaps win prizes if your prediction is correct. If you are ready to try your luck, we have explained the simple steps you can take to get started below.
Step 1
The first step every player must take is to pick the right online gambling site. Thankfully, our editors have examined and recommended the online casinos with good Bau Cua variants in Vietnam. Check out our list on this page and pick your preferred gaming platform.
Step 2
Click on our link to the selected Bau Cua online casino and locate the signup page. There, you need to fill out the registration form by entering your name, email address, phone number, and other details. The next step is to have this information verified by the casino operator.
Step 3
Have a look at the casino’s welcome bonus and other promotions you can use on the selected game. If you are eligible for a bonus, you may receive it automatically or enter a specific bonus code to get it. Make sure the bonus terms and conditions are favorable to you.
Step 4
Go to the Cashier area of the casino website and choose your preferred payment method. Enter the amount of money you wish to deposit, authorize the payment, and claim your first deposit bonus. You can now place bets on your favorite Bầu Cua game and cash out if you win.
The most careful and experienced players normally capitalize on the casino strategies to win. There are many general strategies that recommend how to place wagers, and you can use them in a dice game like Bầu Cua. Although luck plays the biggest role here, you can boost your gaming experience by considering the following tips.
Players can take advantage of various betting strategies that suggest how to place wagers on casino games. For example, you can use the widely popular Martingale and D’Alembert strategies. What they cannot do is reduce your risk: no way of arranging bet sizes changes the house edge, and a doubling progression like Martingale trades a lot of small wins for the risk of one very large loss. Bầu Cua outcomes are completely random, so flat betting leaves you no worse off than any progression.
You will see players tracking which symbols came up most often and betting on them. It is worth being clear about why this does not work: each roll of the three dice is independent, so previous results carry no information about the next one. A symbol that has not appeared for ten rolls is no more likely to appear on the eleventh. Any pattern you find in past rolls is a coincidence, not a signal.
Casino players must learn how to control their emotions when placing bets in Bầu Cua or any other game. As with any other form of gambling, you can either win or lose. And your mind must be prepared to accept the outcomes. Chasing losses is one of the things you must avoid as a gambler. You can always take a break if you are not winning and come back later. Don’t act without thinking, no matter the circumstances.
You don’t need a computer to play Bau Cua or any other dice game. A mobile device such as your smartphone or tablet is just enough to start playing this game today. Players only need to visit mobile casinos in Vietnam using mobile browsers. With the help of HTML5 technology, casino developers have made sure that all popular casino games can run smoothly on modern-day mobile devices.
We must point out that some online casinos have also created mobile gambling apps. Therefore, players can download and install gaming applications on their Android and iOS devices. These apps offer the convenience of playing Bau Cua and other games on the go. Some come with exclusive incentives for mobile gamers.
Bầu Cua Tôm Cá is without a doubt a great game for a player in Vietnam, China, or any other country. The idea here is to guess the outcome when three dice with pictures of various animals and a gourd are rolled. You want to get as many correct guesses as possible to get the biggest win. For instance, getting three correct images means winning three times your wager.
Today could be your lucky day if you think you have what it takes to predict the outcome of a dice game. You can compare the casinos listed on this page. Once you deposit money, you can claim your online casino bonus, play Bầu Cua for real money, and withdraw your winnings using safe banking options.
Casino players looking to play Bầu Cua Tôm Cá online in Vietnam often do so on offshore gambling sites. We have listed the gaming platforms that offer good versions of this game on this page. As you choose, make sure the selected casino is regulated.
The first step is to visit one of our recommended Bau Cua casinos in Việt Nam, sign up, and deposit money using your computer or mobile device. After that, you only need to predict the outcomes of three dice. You can improve your gaming experience by using the Bầu Cua strategies recommended by our editors in this guide.
Reputable Bau Cua online casinos listed on our website provide players with the opportunity to access a variety of bonuses. New players can claim a welcome bonus after registering, while existing customers can benefit from reload offers and other ongoing promotions. Read the bonus terms and conditions beforehand to establish whether the chosen casino allows Bầu Cua and other dice games to count towards wagering requirements.
It’s possible to play free Bầu Cua Tôm Cá if you want to familiarize yourself with the rules of the game. This means playing the demonstration version, which you can do even without creating a casino account. However, you need to sign up and deposit funds to play Bầu Cua online for real money and withdraw your winnings.
Bầu cua tôm cá translates as “gourd–crab–shrimp–fish”, after four of the six pictures on the board. The alternative name bầu cua cá cọp translates as “gourd–crab–fish–tiger”. English sources sometimes call it the Vietnamese gourd-crab-shrimp-fish game, and it is closely related to the Chinese game Hoo Hey How (fish–prawn–crab).
A Vietnamese bầu cua board has six symbols: bầu (gourd), cua (crab), tôm (shrimp), cá (fish), gà (rooster) and nai (deer). Each of the three dice carries all six, one per face, so every square has exactly the same chance of coming up. The Chinese version replaces the deer with a coin, and Thai boards use a tiger.
This is still debated and there is no settled answer. Vietnamese sources usually give three suggestions: that the name simply rhymes better; that it comes from slurring cọc, a word for a stag, into cọp; or that it is confusion with the Thai version, which does have a tiger. All three are hypotheses rather than proven explanations.
With the standard payouts of 1:1, 2:1 and 3:1, the house edge is 7.87%. Across the 216 possible rolls of three dice, a one-unit bet on a single symbol returns 75 + 30 + 3 − 125 = −17 units, and −17/216 is −7.87%. Betting on all six squares at once does not change it. A table paying less than the standard odds costs the player more.
Holding the one-die payout at 1:1, a break-even table pays 3:1 when two dice match and 5:1 when all three do — 75 + 45 + 5 = 125, exactly covering the 125 losing outcomes. Real tables pay 1:1 / 2:1 / 3:1, and that gap of 17/216 is the 7.87% house edge.
The two-dice result. Adding one unit to a tier’s payout removes that tier’s outcome count divided by 216 from the house edge, so one extra unit on the two-dice result (15 outcomes) is worth exactly 15 times one on the three-dice result (1 outcome). A table paying 3:1 when two dice match runs at 0.93%; raising the three-dice payout from 3:1 to 12:1 only gets the edge to 3.70%.
No. Covering one square, or two, or all six, is −7.8704% per unit staked in every case, because expected value simply adds up. Covering all six has no winning outcome at all: 120 of 216 rolls return your stake, 90 lose one unit and 6 lose two.
