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 "Shallow
men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Seven Card Stud High-Low is one of the more mechanical poker games, but it tends to bedevil most players, particularly in a
tournament structure.
Tournament fields break down into several player group/types. One group consists of the regular professional tournament players who
play all games. In general, a great skill they have is to play within the limited bankroll structure of tournaments. Another group are
specialists, players who excel at one game, in whatever format, be it ring games or tournaments, who normally play almost all the
tournaments in their specialty but almost no others.
The most common group fitting this latter definition were Los Angeles Lowball players. Into the 21st Century there were still
a smattering a Lowball ring games around, but every Lowball tournament brought out about three or four dozen fine tournament Lowball players
who either played very few other tournaments, or none at all. In the 1990s Lowball tournaments were some of the juiciest, dead-money events
available, mostly because normal ring game lowball players are simply awful tournament players. The skills don't translate at all.
Drawing to eights and drawing two leads to the rail pretty quickly. Around the turn of the century, those draw-to-eights players were nearly
extinct, and what was left were only the best-adapted Lowball specialists entering. Consequently, Lowball tournaments went extinct even faster.
"Game players" make up another group. One simple way to describe them is to say they are non-specialists who think they are
specialists. They play ring games in a
particular game reasonably well, even excellently, but they simply have almost no tournament skills.
Limit Holdem tournaments have the most of these type players, but the high level of short-term random luck in Holdem gives these players a decent shot.
In Seven Card Stud8 tournaments on the other hand, game players are as dead meat as meat can get. No game fundamentally changes its complexion more between
ring games and tournaments, and during tournaments themselves, than Stud8.
Game players who say "I play the same always" might as well just mail in their money. They need the intervention of the hand of God
and an Uzi to be the last person standing in a Stud8 event.
In Stud8 ring games, the focus is on making strong scooping low hands. Those are the hands that are bettable, that can semi-bluff out mediocre
high hands on fifth and sixth street, can often freeroll during multiway betting, and that when they miss you are left with nothing at all
and don't end up losing extra bets on the final betting round (whereas they always get the extra bet when they win). I won't go into
Stud8 ring game strategy here, but to oversimplify it, you play hands with low cards.
This basic ring game strategy also happens to be how you should approach the first round(s) of a Stud8 tournament (depending on the
amount of chips you get). But after you get past the early stages of the event, everything changes -- unless you have managed
to build up a lot of chips in the early rounds by making two or more big, scooping hands. If you have built up your chips, if you have
a deep bankroll similar to what you would have in a ring game, then you can continue to play speculative hands that can scoop huge pots.
But if you haven't accumulated chips via scooping one or more multiway pots, you must completely change how you play Stud8.
In later stages of a Stud8 tournament, any player showing an ace up will normally make a move at the pot and will usually get away with it.
Aside from not screwing up in these situations, the way to play Stud8 tournaments in late rounds is: play high cards. Game players very
often reach the later stages of Stud8 events and crash on the rocks of something like 345, a very playable hand in a ring game, but
pure sucker's meat when you only have enough chips to play one
or maybe two hands all the way to the end... and will normally be head-up in whatever hand you play. (If you have the bring-in with 345,
and someone completes it to a full bet, then calling the complete will usually be right.)
All High-Low split poker is fundamentally about winning the high portion of the pot -- ideally by scooping the pot. Stud8 has many
betting rounds. Speculative hands love getting multiway odds, but they hate having to call bets all the way to the end, and then
being all-in when they either make or miss their hand. Split Kings are a miserable starting hand in Stud8 ring games. Split Kings are
the road to victory at the end of Stud8 tournaments. The game gets turned completely on its head.
As I've said before, adapt or die. Stud8 tournaments are the adapters heaven, and the rigid-bots nightmare. There are rare times when
low cards should be played late -- cards are live, multiple high hands in the pot, good
position, etc. But usually: play low cards early; play high cards late.
For more see Tournament Poker Strategy including
Tournament End Games |
