While we can’t give you all of the secrets to winning a world championship poker tournament (both of us have visions of winning that some year), this chapter does offer some of the basics of tournaments and practical tips. To get really good at poker, and to have a shot at the World Championship, you need to get experience.

So plan to enter a number of smaller tournaments before you invest $10,000 to enter the World Championship. Oh, and if you do get there and win, don’t forget to credit us for giving you the initial insight! (Acknowledgments and cash sent to the authors will be graciously accepted.)

Seven-Card Stud has five rounds of betting that can create some very large pots. Skilled Seven-Card Stud players need an alert mind and good powers of retention. A skillful player has the ability to relate each card in his hand, or visible in the hand of an opponent, to once-visible but now folded hands, in order to estimate the likelihood of making his hand, as well as to estimate the likelihood that an opponent has made his.

In Seven-Card Stud almost every hand is possible. This is very different than a game like Texas Hold’em, in which a full house or fouraf-a-kind isn’t possible unless the board contains paired cards, and a flush is impossible unless the board contains three cards of the same suit.
With nearly endless possibilities, Seven-Card Stud is a bit like a jigsaw puzzle. One must combine knowledge of exposed and folded cards with previous betting patterns in order to discern the likelihood of any one of a variety of hands that your opponent might be holding.

After slow but steady gains in popularity throughout the 20th century, hold ‘em’s popularity surged in the 2000s due to exposure on television, on the Internet, and in popular literature. During this time hold ‘em replaced 7 card stud as the most common game in U.S. casinos, almost totally eclipsing the once popular game. The no-limit betting form is used in the widely televised main event of the World Series of Poker (WSOP) and the World Poker Tour (WPT).

Because each player only starts with two cards and the remaining cards are shared, it presents an opportune game for strategic analysis (including mathematical analysis). Hold ‘em’s simplicity and popularity have inspired a wide variety of strategy books which provide recommendations for proper play. Most of these books recommend a strategy that involves playing relatively few hands but betting and raising often with the hands one plays.

he strength of a hand is increased by having multiple cards of the same value, all the cards being from the same suit, or having all the cards with consecutive values. The position of the various possible hands is based on the probability of being randomly dealt such a hand from a well-shuffled deck.

The following general rules apply to evaluating poker hands, whatever set of hand values are used.

• Individual cards are ranked A (high), K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, A. Aces only appear low when part of an A-2-3-4-5 straight or straight flush. Individual card ranks are used to compare hands that contain no pairs or other special combinations, or to compare the kickers of otherwise equal hands. The ace only plays low in ace-to-five and ace-to-six lowball games, and only plays high in deuce-to-seven lowball.
• Suits have no value. The suits of the cards are mainly used in determining whether a hand fits a certain category (specifically the flush and straight flush hands). In most variants, if two players have hands that are identical except for suit, then they are tied and split the pot (so 3? 4? 5? 6? 7? does not beat 3? 4? 5? 6? 7?). Sometimes a ranking called high card by suit is used for randomly selecting a player to deal. Low card by suit usually determines the bringin bettor in stud games.
• A hand always consists of five cards. In games where more than five cards are available to each player, each player must choose some five-card subset according to the rules of the game, and comparing that five-card hand against the five-card hands of the other players. Whatever cards remain after choosing the five to be played are of no consequence in determining the winner.
• Hands are ranked first by category, then by individual card ranks: even the lowest qualifying hand in a certain category defeats all hands in all lower categories. The smallest two pair hand (2? 2? 3? 3? 4?), for example, defeats all hands with just one pair or high card. Only between two hands in the same category are card ranks used to break ties.