Poker Games

Popular Online Poker Games At a Glance

Poker Games

There are so many variations of poker and this is one of the factors which makes it such an exciting game. However the most popularly played tournament game world-wide is definitely Texas Holdem. This is the game you see being played at the WSOP, and other live and televised tournaments with big money prizes.

Texas Hold`em, or simply Holdem if you like is called a "thinking man’s game", it involves skill and strategy and like all games of poker, psychology. The point of playing is to become a winning player and the objective is to compete for money which the players have contributed to the pot. First introduced to Las Vegas in 1967 by Doyle Brunson and a group of well known poker players, the popularity of this game has proved to be exponential.

The rules are simple, it is a community poker game which means two cards are dealt to each player face down and five are dealt to the centre of the table. Each player has to use their own two cards, plus the community cards to make the best poker hand possible, and it is a pretty standard deviation of poker with simple to learn fundamentals.

Omaha is another standard deviation of poker, also popularly played online, with its most significant difference from Holdem being that each player is dealt 4 hole cards. Only two of these have to be used together with 3 community cards to make the best poker hand. Omaha poker is also played in a Hi-Lo version, and the prize pot in this game is generally limited or "fixed".

Seven Card Stud is the poker game most often played by families at the kitchen table; it is the most traditional form of poker and is available at all good online poker sites. Three cards are dealt initially, one open and two face-down and each player successively receives three more open cards and one face down in five betting rounds. Again this game can also be played in a Hi-Lo format. Seven Card Stud is also called Razz.

Crazy Pineapple, Five Card Stud, Five Card Draw, 2-7 triple Draw, A-5 lowball and a whole load of deviations from standard poker have been played in casinos and in online poker rooms. While the small poker rooms offer less variation, the large rooms offer more. Some of the tournaments on offer feature a mix of games and these tend to become known according to the acronym which the first letter of each game represents. For example HO, HA, Horse, 8-Game, Rash and Shoe!

8-Game has received it’s notoriety by being most often play during Poker Stars and it is an 8 game specialty as the name suggests. In these tournaments, the H stands for Holdem, O stands for Omaha, R is for Razz and so on. Poker players have come up with some amazing acronyms for these tournaments and during one seven game tournament, one cheeky player coined the name "HOTARSE". This, as you can imagine, went down very well with the rest of the players in the tournament, and seems to have stuck.