PH90 Sic Bo: Reading a Layout Where Every Bet Differs

Sic bo puts three dice against a layout of about a dozen different bets, and the single most important thing to know is that those bets are not equally priced. A player who sticks to two of them and a player who sticks to two others are playing games with very different costs.

What a sic bo layout puts in front of you

Roughly 12 distinct bets share one felt, and they do not share a price. A ₱100 stake costs a different amount depending only on which box it lands in. Reading the layout as a menu of equally valid options is the mistake this page exists to head off.

The layout is a price list

The relationship between advertised payout and cost is unusually direct here: small and big pay 1x, while a specific triple pays up to 180x. Small and big pay even money and cost the least. A specific triple pays enormous odds and costs the most. Everything else falls between the two in roughly the order you would guess from the payouts.

That makes sic bo a good place to see the general principle at work: the house edge behind it is built into the odds of each outcome, so a bet advertising a large return has to be rare, and the operator prices the rarity in its own favour. The bigger number on the felt is the warning, not the offer.

How to read the layout in three steps

1. Find the even-money boxes — small, big, odd, even. Those are the cheapest bets on the felt.
2. Read every other payout against them. A 30x box is not 30 times better; it is 30 times rarer and priced worse.
3. Ignore the result history strip entirely. Each roll of the 3 dice is independent of the last.

The triple rule, and why it exists

Small covers the 4 to 10 totals; big covers 11 to 17. Between them they look like they cover everything, and without one further rule they would — each would win half the time and cost nothing at all.

Problem: small and big together appear to cover every outcome, so both should be free.

Fix: read the triple exception. Both lose on any three-of-a-kind, which costs each bet roughly 2.8% of its value and is the entire source of the advantage on the two cheapest boxes. Three matching dice, whatever they show, take both bets. That single exception is the entire source of the advantage on the two cheapest bets on the table, which makes it the clearest illustration on any floor of an edge created by a rule rather than by a payout.

The combination bets in the middle

Between the two extremes sit the bets most players actually spend their time on, and they are worth separating.

Bet	Typical payout	Relative cost
Small / big	1x	Lowest
Odd / even	1x	Lowest
Single number	1x to 3x	Low to middling
Specific total	6x to 60x	Middling
Two-dice combination	5x	Middling
Any triple	30x	High
Specific triple	Up to 180x	Highest

A specific total — say, exactly 10 — is priced against how many of the 216 possible outcomes produce it, and pays between 6x and 60x accordingly. Totals near the middle of the range have many combinations and short odds; totals at the ends have few and long ones. The payout moves with the combination count, which is why a layout shows a different figure beside almost every total.

A single number bet pays according to how many dice show your chosen face, one through three, with the stake returned. That is the colour game structure exactly, with numbers in place of colours, and it carries a comparable cost.

A two-dice combination asks that two named numbers both appear somewhere in the roll, typically paying 5x. It is the most legible of the combination bets because the condition is easy to check at a glance, and it sits in the middle of the price range.

None of these is a trap in the way the 180x specific triple is. They are simply more expensive than small and big, and a player choosing between them should know by how much rather than by how the payout reads.

Where it sits among the dealt games

Sic bo, on a table supplied by Evolution or a competitor, is filed alongside pusoy in either form in most lobbies, which is misleading: pusoy is played against other people, sic bo against a fixed paytable. The dragon tiger layout is its closest neighbour in spirit — dealt, quick and decided in one step — and the colour game layout shares its single-number bet almost exactly.