Sic Bo Payouts, Odds and House Edge
Three dice give 6 × 6 × 6 = 216 equally likely outcomes, and every figure in this section is counted from those 216. That is the whole of Sic Bo maths: once you know how many of the 216 outcomes a bet wins on, the payout tells you exactly what the bet costs.
Paytables differ between casinos, and the house edge moves with them, so check the paytable at the table you are actually playing. The payouts below are the common ones; the section further down shows what happens when a table pays less.
Every Sic Bo Bet, What It Pays and What It Costs
Two things fall out of that table. Small, Big, Odd and Even all cost exactly the same 2.7778% — there is no cleverness to be had in choosing between them, and they are the cheapest bets on the layout by a wide margin. And the reason none of them is a true coin flip is the triple: 4-4-4 sums to 12, which is inside the Big range, but a triple loses Big anyway. That single rule is worth 6 of the 216 outcomes to the house, which is where 6/216 = 2.7778% comes from.
The single-die bet is the one most often misread. Its 42.13% is the chance your number appears at all; the 1:1 payout only applies when it shows once. Two dice pay 2:1 and all three pay 3:1, and even with those bonuses the bet costs 7.8704% — nearly three times Small or Big.
Every Total From 4 to 17
A total bet on 9 and a total bet on 10 look interchangeable and are not: they pay the same 6:1 while 10 comes up 27 times in 216 and 9 comes up 25.
7 and 14 are the cheapest totals at 9.72%, and 9 and 12 the dearest at 18.98% — the two sit side by side on the layout and differ by a factor of two in what they cost. Totals of 3 and 18 do not exist as a total bet: those are triples, and they are covered by the triple boxes instead.
Sic Bo RTP
RTP is simply 100% minus the house edge, so the RTP column above is the same information read the other way round. A Sic Bo table does not have one RTP — it has a different one for every box on the felt, from 97.22% on Small and Big down to 81.02% on a total of 9 or 12. That spread is much wider than in baccarat or blackjack, and it is the main thing worth knowing before you place a chip.
Super Sic Bo, the live-dealer variant, adds random multipliers to some boxes before the dice are shaken. The multipliers are paid for by a shorter base payout on the boxes that receive them, so the base RTP on Small, Big, Odd and Even stays at 97.22%.
The Same Bet, a Shorter Paytable
The bets that look most generous are the ones whose paytables vary most between operators, and the difference is not small.
A specific triple at 150:1 instead of 180:1 costs almost twice as much per spin of the cage, and nothing on screen announces it. The paytable is printed on the layout in every live and RNG version of the game, so it takes a few seconds to read before you sit down.
What the House Edge Costs Over a Session
The edge applies to every unit you stake, not to the money you sit down with, so the figure that matters is turnover. A hundred rounds at 50,000 VND is 5,000,000 VND of turnover, whatever your balance does along the way.
Staying on the even-money boxes is worth roughly 6.7 times the specific-double box over the same number of rounds. That is the single largest decision available in Sic Bo, and it is made before the dice move.
Tài Xỉu: the Vietnamese Name for Sic Bo
In Vietnam the game is called tài xỉu, and the name is the bet: tài is big and xỉu is small. The two boxes labelled Tài (11 to 17) and Xỉu (4 to 10) on a Vietnamese-language table are the same Big and Small bets in the table above, with the same triple exception and the same 2.7778% cost, so everything on this page applies to them unchanged.
Vietnamese-facing lobbies list the game under Tài Xỉu or Xúc Xắc rather than Sic Bo, and many of them run two versions side by side: the live-dealer table, where a human shakes the dice on camera, and a fast RNG version that deals a new round as soon as the last one settles. Some of the RNG versions are marketed as tài xỉu MD5 — the operator publishes a hash of the result before betting opens and the underlying value afterwards, so a player can check that the round was not changed after the bets went on. It is a fairness check on the round, not a way to predict it.
Tài xỉu is often confused with two other Vietnamese dice games that work quite differently. Bầu cua cá cọp also uses three dice, but the faces carry six symbols instead of pips and you back a symbol rather than a total, which costs 7.8704% per symbol. Xóc đĩa uses four two-sided discs in a bowl and is settled on the red-white split. If you want the full range of three-dice formats side by side, the dice games page covers them together.
Sic Bo Table Layout
The layout is quite different from other table games you are used to playing. Though you will find tables with green and blue surfaces, many variations use bright red and yellow, and some use black-and-white betting areas. The boxes are grouped the same way everywhere: Small and Big at the two ends, the totals along the middle, the specific doubles and triples in the centre, the two-dice combinations in a grid, and the six single-number boxes across the bottom. Each box carries its payout printed on the felt, which is what makes the paytable check above quick.
Sic Bo Strategy and Winning Tips
No bet on the layout has a positive expectation and no staking pattern changes any of the numbers above, so a Sic Bo strategy is really a set of choices about which boxes to use and how long to play.
- Read the paytable before you sit down — the same triple bet can cost 13.89% or 30.56%.
- Small, Big, Odd and Even at 2.7778% are the cheapest boxes on the table; everything else costs at least three times as much.
- If you play totals, 7 and 14 cost 9.72% while 9 and 12 cost 18.98% for the same 6:1-looking layout.
- Covering both Small and Big at once cancels out — one wins what the other loses and the triple takes both.
- Dice have no memory: a run of eight Bigs does not change the next round, which is still 105 in 216.
- Practise in free mode first — most RNG Sic Bo tables have a demo, and the fast rounds add up quickly for real money.
Live Dealer Sic Bo
Many casinos now offer live dealer games, including several versions of Sic Bo. The dice sit in a sealed shaker that the dealer or an automated cage agitates on camera, the result is read by the studio and settled automatically, and you can chat with the dealer in real time. The dealer has no influence on the outcome, and the paytable is on screen throughout — which is where to check the triple and double payouts before betting.
Evolution’s Super Sic Bo is the most widely carried live version, adding random multipliers of up to 1,000x on selected boxes before each shake. Vietnamese-facing lobbies typically also carry Tài Xỉu tables from the Asian studios, dealt in Vietnamese with VND chips.