Jennifer Harman

Stud-8 or Better is a great game. The rules are nearly identical to regular 7-Card Stud, but there’s one key difference. At showdown, the pot is split; half is given to the player with the best high, and half to the player with the best low. In order to take a portion of the pot, a low hand must have no card higher than an 8. If there is no qualifying low, the high hand takes the entire pot.

With players aiming for both high and low hands, Stud-8 invites a lot of action. But beginning players, even those with some 7-Card Stud experience, often come to a Stud-8 table with a poor understanding of what hands do well in this split-pot game.

To understand what types of hands you should play in Stud-8, you must grasp this key concept: In Stud-8, you’re looking to scoop pots. By scoop, I mean that you want to take both the high and the low halves of the pot. That’s where you’re going to make your real profit.

The starting hands that are most likely to make you the sole winner of a big pot contain three low suited connectors. For example, As-2s-3s and 4h-5h-6h have great potential. They’ll often make unbeatable lows and have a flush or a straight to go along with them. So, if you see a hand that starts with three low suited cards, look to play it aggressively.

You should play hands with three low cards, especially those that include an Ace. A starting hand like Ac-2d-7c may not have potential to make a flush, but there is a good chance that you’ll create a solid low. And the Ace gives you a shot at a decent high, with something like Aces-up. Even a hand like 4-5-7 has enough of an opportunity to make both straights and lows to make it playable.

The major mistake that new Stud-8 players make is that they play aggressively with hands that might serve them well in a regular game of 7-Card Stud. For instance, a hand like T-J-Q plays well when you only need to be concerned about creating a high hand. But in Stud-8, this is a hand that should be mucked. With no chance of making a low, a player could find himself chasing a draw that would only net half the pot. Those sorts of situations will often lead to dreadful results.

Big pairs, like Jacks, Queens and Kings, are also difficult to play in Stud-8. A quick example will illustrate the problem big pairs present. Say you’re dealt a Queen and a 7 in the hole, and another Queen as your up-card, giving you a pair. After the betting on third street, two other players remain, one showing a 5, the other a 3. This appears to be a good situation for you, as the other two seem to be looking for lows. But then, on fourth street, the player who had a 3 catches an Ace and you find a 9. Now you’re in a very difficult spot. The Ace might have helped your opponent’s low draw and perhaps added a straight draw to his hand. Or it might have paired an Ace he had in the hole. It would be difficult to know where you stand. Even if you were ahead, you need to be concerned that your opponent will pair the Ace or hit a straight before the end of the hand.

If you’re going to play big pairs in Stud-8, proceed with caution. Be ready to dump the hand if one or more of your opponents develop a scary board.

The later streets in Stud-8 can be lot of fun as players try to figure out how their opponents’ hands are developing. It takes practice and experience to become a good Stud-8 player. But if you follow the suggestions for starting hands I discussed here, you should be on your way to playing Stud-8 profitably.

Steve Brecher

Most players know that pre-flop position is important in hold ‘em. The earlier your position, the more players there are behind you and, unless you hold pocket Aces, the bigger the chance that one of them will have a hand better than yours.

There is another aspect to position: It’s better to act after your opponent(s) rather than before. But for this tip, I’m going to investigate the chances that a player behind you will have a better hand.

There is no universal definition of what “better” means when comparing hold ‘em starting hands. For this article, I needed some reasonable, quantifiable criterion. So in the following, I’m assuming that one hand is “better” than another if its showdown equity is greater. A hand’s showdown equity against another hand is the average portion of the pot it will win across all possible combinations of board cards. This is similar to the percentages that TV poker programs display next to player hands when the players are all-in. If you’re interested in investigating this for yourself, there are several free computer programs and websites which calculate the showdown equities of user-specified competing hands.

For example, Ah 2d all-in pre-flop against Kc Qc will, over all possible boards, win an average of 53.9% of the pot. So the A-2 is the “better” hand against K-Q suited by our definition. Obviously, it is not better for all purposes; at a full table I’d usually open-raise in early position with K-Q suited, but toss A-2 offsuit.

Given some specific hand category – such as K-Q suited – we’ll need to know the chance that a random hand dealt from the remaining 50 cards will be “better.” This requires that we have a showdown equity calculation for each of the 1,225 possible opposing hands and tabulate against how many of them the K-Q suited has the worse (less than 50%) equity. It turns out that 238 of the 1,225 possible opponent hands are “better” in this sense. So we say that the chance of a random hand being better than K-Q suited is 238/1,225 or 19.4%; conversely, the chance that a random hand will not be better is 80.6%. This tabulation would be too tedious to do by hand. For the example results below, I developed some simple software to do the calculations.

Suppose that you are considering an opening bet pre-flop. There are players yet to act behind you. I’ll denote the number of hands to play behind you as N. For example, if you’re on the button, then there are two hands – the blinds – behind you, and N would be equal to 2. What is the probability that none of some number of random hands will be better than yours? It is the chance that one random hand will not be better than yours multiplied by itself N-1 times, which is the same as saying it’s that probability raised to the Nth power. For example, if there’s a 40% chance that a random hand won’t be better (i.e., a 60% chance it will be better), then the chance that none of three random hands will be better is 40% x 40% x 40%, or 0.4 to the 3rd power, which equals 0.064. Hence, the chance that at least one of the three hands will be better is 1.0 – 0.064 or 0.936 or 94%.

I think the most interesting thing about these numbers is the difference between earlier and later positions. This is something to consider when you’re thinking of open-raising in early position.

Big Slick: A Slippery Hand

Rafe Furst

I often tell people that short-term results are not a reason to change how they play, but I likewise encourage them to use any excuse to study and analyze their game.

Recently, a player on Full Tilt Poker lamented that he’d gone broke with A-K in his last several tourneys, and he suspected that he was doing something wrong. A few questions revealed that he was getting knocked out fairly early in these tournaments when he put his A-K up against pocket pairs for all his chips. It’s a familiar lament.

Many people fall in love with A-K pre-flop in No-Limit Hold ‘em because they know that they can rarely be much worse than 50-50 to win the hand if they get all of their money in heads up. While this is true, the reverse is also true: Rarely will you be much better than 50-50 to win an all-in showdown.

So why is A-K considered such a great starting hand? Folding equity. Under the right conditions, you can increase your pot equity to well over 50% by getting your opponents to fold in situations where they shouldn’t. Here’s a scenario: Blinds are $200-$400 and Jen Harman (who has $12,000 in front of her) raises to $1,200 from middle position with pocket tens. You re-raise all-in for $6,000 with A-K from the button. It is difficult for Jen to call here because, even though she suspects you might have A-K, she knows you could also make that play with A-A, K-K, Q-Q or J-J.

Does she want to play for half of her stack on what figures to be, at best, a 57% favorite? You, on the other hand, are confident that unless she has one of two hands (AA or KK), you are no worse than 43% to win, even if she calls. Unless Jen picks up on a tell, she is forced to fold a hand that is actually better than your A-K by a slight margin. Not only that, but you’ve also made her give up all the extra chips in the pot (mostly hers) that were giving her great odds to make a call. Variants of this scenario come up all the time in No-Limit Hold ‘em.

By putting your opponents in a bind where they must first call you and then have to beat you in a race, you can turn a hand that is 50% to win with all the money in pre-flop and turn it into a hand that is a 75% favorite or better.

The mistake many inexperienced players make is not giving their opponents a chance to fold. They look down to find A-K and can’t wait to get all their money in the middle and race. But as we can see from the example above, the power of A-K pre-flop really comes from the “folding equity” you gain when you can make your opponent lay down a hand they would not lay down if they could see your hole cards.

Here are three keys to getting the most out of A-K pre-flop:

1) Jam with A-K, but don’t call all-in with it.

2) Raise enough when you have A-K to give your opponents a chance to fold.

3) Don’t raise so much that the only hands that are willing to call you are the hands that have you dominated (A-A and K-K).

To execute these plays properly, it is important to keep in mind the size of the blinds relative to your opponents’ stacks and your own stack. A-K loses much of its value when your opponents are short-stacked or pot committed — and therefore unlikely to lay down a hand — or when the blinds are very small relative to everyone’s stacks. These principles apply to both ring game and tournament play. Getting back to my friend who kept busting early in tourneys with A-K…

In the early stages of a tournament, the blinds are very small relative to everyone’s stack size. This contributed to his breaking of each of the three rules:

(1) He was calling his opponents’ all-in raises when they had their expected pocket pairs.

(2) He was jamming only after his opponents were pot-committed.

(3) After getting gun shy from having his A-K cracked a few times, he made his raises way too big to “protect” his hand, but then was only getting called once he was beat.

This is one of those instances where looking at short-term results can lead to long-term improvements.