Bobby,
I spent some time analyzing this sidebet today and, assuming it's a 6 deck shoe, I found the following results showing a player's edge of over 1.58%:
Player Dealer Payout Probability Return
Suited Pair Suited Lower 25 0.00186703 0.04667566
Unsuited Pair Suited Lower 10 0.01400270 0.14002697
Suited non-Pair Suited Lower than High 5 0.05489555 0.27447775
Unsuited non-Pair Suited Lower 2 0.16131107 0.32262213
Lose -1 0.76792366 -0.76792366
Total 1.00000000 0.01587885
.
As an example of my calculations, the probability that the player will receive a suited pair is 5/311 = 0.016077..., because once the player has his first card, say 9C, then the shoe has 5 more 9C's out of 311 cards.
The probability that the dealer's card will be the same suit but a different rank is then (5/311)*(12*6)/310 = 0.003734..., because the club suit has 12 other ranks besides the 9C times 6 decks, divided by the remaining 310 cards.
Finally, overall the player will have the higher rank half the time (the other half of the time, of course, the dealer will have the higher rank), so we multiply by one-half to get the win probability: (5/311)*((12*6)/310)*(1/2) = 0.001867...
For an 8-deck game, the player's edge is even higher: just over 1.75%.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the rules. When you say "25:1", do you mean that, for a $1 bet, you get $25 PLUS you get back your original $1? That's the usual meaning of the phrase "25 to 1", and so that's what I assumed in my calculations. If instead you get $25 but the dealer keeps your $1, then we say that is "25 for 1". If the odds you quoted are actually "for" odds, then the house has a gigantic edge of over 21%.
Can you show how you calculated a house edge of 4%? Also, can you confirm that the odds are "to" odds?
Dog Hand
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