7 Card Stud was the poker game to play long before Texas Hold’em ever hit the tables in Vegas. This has not stopped it from still being an extremely popular choice of game and you will find it still played widely in land casinos, online casinos and poker rooms.
Getting the basics of betting, bluffing and generally how to play, before you play, is always a good way to go, because at some point in time, if you take your poker seriously, you will be called upon to play 7 Card Stud Poker as one of a series of games in a tournament – HORSE for example!
Poker is the only card game played in which you don’t actually have to have a winning hand in order to win and this calls for bluffing. You can pretty much bluff you way to win with a bad hand, but it means taking bad risks. However, bluffing is still believed to be the cornerstone of playing 7 Card Stud.
Bluffing means understanding how to read boards, but whatever else you do, avoid bluffing if you don’t have the hand to back it up. This is called the “dark-tunnel bluff” and it is a bluff made with absolutely no reason. This is decisions made arbitrarily, generally in a whim and is only done because the player wants to feel like they are playing poker.
As playing poker calls for decision making skills a dark-tunnel bluff with a pair of 8′s is a really bad decision. This is like playing two-card roulette, a close cousin to Russian roulette!
Poker psychology is called to play and to make a good bluff the player needs to understand what is happening in the minds of their opponents. This includes betting patterns, the texture of the board and implied odds as well as the prize pot.
There are a number of relevant questions the 7 Card Stud player needs to ask of themselves. Is the opponent a draw maths player, are they a mad gorilla? and many more. Until all the relevant questions have been asked, a bluff cannot be made with any sure outcome.
The game of 7 Card Stud is a five-card community board, and this is one of the factors which will help you to win or beat you. This is why reading the board before bluffing is so important. It offers a total combination of hand, the one you hold, excluding two cards and the hand on the board. This keeps decision making simple and is what makes the game easier than Hold’em. So it’s a case of the board and your hand!
Making a strong bluff depends on the odds of other players in the game also having strong hands. It is pointless going into a bluff without at the very least a starting hand and the probabilities of being dealt a stud starting hand vary. If you are not dealt a strong starting hand, fold. Wait until you have a strong starter to bluff. One of the biggest mistakes new 7 Card Stud players make is playing with a weak or non-starter hand.