Dragon Tiger Rules: How to Play, Payouts and Odds

1. Place your bet on Dragon, Tiger, or Tie before any cards are revealed. Many tables also offer side bets (covered below).
2. One card is dealt face-up to the Dragon position, and one to the Tiger position. Most tables deal from a shoe of 8 standard 52-card decks.
3. Cards are compared by rank only: Ace is lowest (worth 1), then 2 through 10, then Jack, Queen and King (highest, worth 13). Suits don't decide the winner.
4. Whichever side shows the higher card wins. If both cards have the same rank, the round is a Tie.
5. On a Tie, Tie bets win, and most versions return half of each Dragon or Tiger bet (you lose the other half). Some apps take the full Dragon/Tiger bet instead, so read the table's rules screen before playing.

This is the opposite of Teen Patti, where the Ace is the highest card. Players who come from Teen Patti often expect an Ace to win, and in Dragon Tiger it loses to every other card.

The table below uses the most common rules: an 8-deck shoe, Dragon and Tiger paying 1:1 with half the bet returned on a tie, and a Tie bet paying 8:1. The probabilities come from the card counts in the shoe (416 cards), so you can check them yourself.

Where the Tie number comes from: once the Dragon card is dealt, 415 cards remain, and 31 of them share its rank (32 copies in 8 decks, minus the one already dealt). That gives 31 ÷ 415 = 7.47%. At 8:1, a Tie bet returns 8 units 7.47% of the time and loses 1 unit the other 92.53%, which works out to an average loss of about 33 paise for every rupee staked.

Payouts differ between apps. If a table pays less than 1:1 on Dragon or Tiger, or less than 8:1 on a Tie, the house edge is higher than shown here. Check the table's paytable before you play.

• Big / Small: whether a chosen side's card is above 7 (Big) or below 7 (Small). A 7 usually loses both bets, which is where the house edge comes from.
• Odd / Even: whether a chosen side's card has an odd or even rank. The 7 is again often excluded.
• Card colour or suit: red or black, or a specific suit, on a chosen side.
• Suited Tie: both cards match in rank and suit. Rare, and priced accordingly.

Side bet rules and payouts vary more between apps than the main bets do, so read the rules screen for each one. None of them changes the basic fact that every Dragon Tiger bet is decided by chance.

No betting pattern changes the odds. The Dragon and Tiger bets have the same edge, so neither side is "better", and streaks shown on a table's history board don't predict the next card. Card counting can shift the Tie odds slightly late in a physical shoe, but online tables typically reshuffle often or use continuous shuffling, which removes that. The only choice that measurably affects your expected loss is which bet you pick: Dragon or Tiger at about 3.7% costs far less over time than the Tie at about 33%.

Both are simple, fast single-bet casino games often bundled alongside Teen Patti, but they're not the same game. Andar Bahar deals multiple cards down two piles until a rank match appears; Dragon vs. Tiger deals exactly one card to each of two positions and compares them directly. Dragon vs. Tiger resolves faster and has simpler, more directly comparable odds since it's a straightforward high-card comparison rather than a race to a matching rank.

Like Andar Bahar, Dragon vs. Tiger is rarely a standalone app. It's most commonly offered as one of several tables inside broader multi-game apps alongside Teen Patti and rummy variants. See our Teen Patti directory for apps that typically bundle it.