For the past two and a half years I've been covering the standard 7-card stud game found in casinos and poker rooms in the United States. But stud is played more often as a home game these days. As such, it is often given to many twists and turns. I thought I'd branch out for my next few articles and write about 7-Card Stud the home game. I'd like to look at some of those variations. There's a lot of skill involved that players often don't consider. I had an argument with a budding author a few months back.
This young guy sent me an email seeking assistance. He said that he was working on a new book on home poker and he wanted some help making his case.
Here's what it was. He noticed that many "friendly game" type players played all sorts of "crazy games". He took this as a sign of their immaturity and inexperience. His mission was to reform them by getting them to eschew those games that were, in his estimation, almost completely luck, and instead to concentrate on learning real poker games like they played in casinos. He wanted me to help him with this effort.
I told him that the only assistance I would provide would be in trying to dissuade him from writing such an incorrectly premised text. At first he thought I was joking with him. So he laughed. And then, when he realized I was serious he tried to convince me that his was a truly noble mission.
As he saw it - and admittedly as many "serious" poker players see it - anything other than the standard games that are or were played in casinos are not truly games of skill. They are just luck fests that reduce poker to a game of showdown - where the luckiest guy wins.
In my view this is terribly wrongheaded. There are so many great variations of those standard casino games that require extraordinary skill to play well. Why convince people to stop playing them? Better, I'd think, for the skilled player to encourage the proliferation of those types of games. That way, there will be ample opportunity for the truly skilled player to exploit his advantage against the inexperienced and unskilled.
Let's start with the most common standard variation of stud called in home games: 7-Card Stud, Hi Lo declare. There isn't a casino anywhere around that spreads this game. And yet it's immensely popular in home games up and down the East Coast - and I suspect in kitchens and living rooms from coast to coast as well.
This is not a game of luck. In fact, it is a game of such fine skill - requiring many skills in fact to play expertly - that an expert playing with novices or otherwise unskilled players will be able to win almost regardless of the cards he holds.
It's dealt exactly like the 7-Card Stud we know from the casino. But there are a few differences. First of all, low hands - hands that would be considered terrible in standard 7-Card stud - can win half the pot. For those of you who aren't familiar with low hands, it's really just turning hand values on their head. You want the weakest standard hands. So if a seven is the highest card in the worst five card poker hand you can make that's a very good hand in low poker. And since you're trying to make your hand as low as possible you count the Ace as low. The rules are (in my home games anyway) that in your low hand straights and flushes don't count. So the best low would be the A-2-3-4-5 --known as the "wheel" or "bicycle".
In the next article in the series we'll look at more of the rules of 7-card hi-lo declare.
