This is a poker variant that, for people who don’t play online, may be unfamiliar.

Badugi has become more popular in America only recently. It can be found primarily online. I have never seen it in Atlantic City. From what I can find scouring the internet, it is very rare to find brick and mortar poker rooms that offer it anywhere else either. But its worth trying out as it is easy to find mixed games online that have Badugi shuffled in there.  For the uninitiated, here are the rules.

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I think its high time I dropped some multiculturalism on you readers out there. Did you know that not everybody in the world does things the way American’s do? Shocking I know, but even when it comes to cards, there are cultural differences.

In my chosen profession, I have the good fortune of meeting more people from outside the US than most. My buddy is from Turkey. We recently got together with some other friends to play a little friendly game. As he began to dealt, we didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

Apparently they have different names for some of the symbols on the cards. They still use the French suits (that is the name for the standard suit system we use). The heart is obviously still a heart. You can probably glean the others from the title; club is a clover (I honestly like that one better, it looks like a damn clover and I’ve maintained it should be called that multiple times in the past), spade is a leaf, and the diamond is a tile. He told us, in a very matter of fact way, that Americans are girly for calling it a diamond.

There are other suit systems besides this one. The two other major ones are the German and Latin. They use symbols like swords, acorns, and chalices - all manner of outlandish icons. How true that bussiness is I dont know. I just found that out from a quick google search which turned up this website. But I would imagine that the evolution of the playing card deck is probably an interesting one. I’ll have to read up on it and let you all know what I find.

That’s right, stud poker is once again the object of inquiry here on poker moments. I have said many times before that the first serious poker games I played were 7-card stud and it stands to this day as one of my favorites.

I read an interesting little article that reminded me of some of the reasons why I like it so much. It has different dynamics than hold ‘em which make it challenging for the uninitiated. It basically boils down to the amount of information a player has: LOTS!

Think about it. How many cards do you see in a hold ‘em game? Only the cards that will be available to comprise your hand, a maximum of 7. In stud, you will see more than that before you’ve even made your first bet. Poker is a game of ferreting out information. The more you have, the better your position. The lack of it is the challenge with hold ‘em. Conversely, 7-card stud is an embarrassment of riches. So many cards are thrown out and then pulled from view when players fold, that it is hard to keep track of all the information you have. It’s relatively easy to just remember general odds for particular draws in hold ‘em, but all the cards flying around in Stud make it far more difficult. Your straight draw can be an easy call or an instant muck but only if you noticed what everybody else folded behind you.

So stop playing “the cadillac of poker” once in a while and try out an entirely diffferent poker skill set. Any good athlete cross trains and so should a good poker player. Even if this article did, to my chagrin, claim that it is an old man’s game.