Hold'em and its cousins: a guide to poker variants

In hold'em and many other variants, a contested showdown compares five-card hands using the familiar hand rankings. Pots can also end with everyone folding, while lowball and split-pot games use different winning rules. The games differ in how you get your cards:

• Community card games deal each player a few private cards and share the rest face up in the middle. Hold'em and Omaha work this way.
• Stud games deal each player their own cards, some face down and some face up, with no shared cards.
• Draw games deal every card face down and let players swap some for new ones.

On top of that, some games award the pot to the lowest hand instead of the highest, and some split it between the two.

In Omaha each player gets four private cards instead of two, and the final hand must use exactly two of them with exactly three from the board. The high version is usually played pot-limit, where a player facing a bet may raise by up to the pot after first matching the call, and goes by the short name PLO. Its exact origin is unknown. The casino executive Robert Turner is credited with first bringing it into a casino, through Bill Boyd, who dealt it at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas.

Four cards create more combinations of two hole cards. In the matchups below, that makes aces a smaller favourite than in hold'em. Here is the same pair of aces, played against the same kind of hand under both sets of rules:

Against a random hand, aces win 85% of the time in hold'em and 65% in Omaha, counting ties as half a win in both figures. Against four connected, double-suited cards they are barely ahead. Your equity is the share of the pot you win on average, so these aces matchups offer less protection in a pre-flop all-in. The side cards, suits and opposing range matter greatly.

Short deck, also called six-plus hold'em, removes the twos to fives and plays hold'em with the 36 cards left. An ace can still play low, so A-6-7-8-9 is a straight. The game spread among high-stakes players in Asia, and the Triton series ran the first televised short-deck tournaments in 2018.

With fewer ranks, flushes get harder to make and full houses easier, enough that the usual order flips. Counting every five-card hand shows why:

With a full deck there are more flushes than full houses, so the full house ranks higher. With 36 cards there are about 4 full houses for every flush, so short deck ranks the flush above the full house. These counts help explain the usual short-deck ranking. House rules vary, so check the full ranking before playing; rarity alone is not a universal rule across poker variants.

Seven-card stud deals each player two cards face down and one face up, then three more face up and a last one face down, with a betting round after each. The lowest card showing pays a forced bet, the bring-in, to start the action. Before hold'em took over in the 2000s, stud was one of the most played games in American home games. Because you see some of each opponent's cards, it helps to remember what has been folded when counting your outs.

Razz is stud played for the lowest hand. Draw games, such as five-card draw, deal five private cards and let you exchange some of them; with no cards on show, betting patterns and the number of cards drawn are most of the information you get.

Mixed games rotate through several variants, so one player has to be good at all of them. The best known is H.O.R.S.E.: hold'em, Omaha high-low eight or better, razz, seven-card stud and stud high-low eight or better. In 2006 the World Series of Poker held a $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. event, the largest buy-in in WSOP history at that time, and Chip Reese won it.

Across these games, you compare the price of a call with the share of the pot you expect to win. The lesson the same hand can face a different price shows how to weigh them, and it works in any variant.