If the flop games suddenly disappeared, or never existed, what would be the best game to use for the WSOP ME?

There is really only one choice, and if I had anything to bet with I would wager it would be selected for the role by any suitable panel of experts, or of average Holdem players. It's not a hard decision, when you consider that the only other games available are five-card stud and variations on Draw poker. Traditional seven-card stud doesn't make it to the starting gate because it's so hopeless as a no-limit game, and using fixed-limits for the ME would be a bad joke.

In the hypothetical absence of Holdem, the game which would be best for the ME uses seven-cards, is four rounds long, with two hole-cards and five up-cards, and it has a multi-card draw, or deal, at the second round which brings five cards into play. That description applies to only two games, namely Holdem and Stud with a flip, which is Stud played with no bet on fourth street - dealing two-cards instead of one after the opening bets (ie, "the two-card flip") - and with the river card dealt face-up.

It's not a game which can match Holdem for multi-tabling, but apart from that the two games have similar strategic content, range of playable hands, visual appeal and suitability for no-limit.

no limit 2-7 single draw

I guess you are not serious, I mean, would you bet on that, or invest your own money in organizing such an event? No one would recognize it as the world championship of poker, that's for sure.

The suggestion does shine a light on the supposed rich vein of variability in poker: in fact, if you remove the flop games from the conventional playlist, there is nothing a modern casual player (as opposed to poker tragics who will play anything) is interested in. Without the flop games, and NL holdem in particular, Poker would be in the dark ages. Even removing NL betting would be a disaster. Without NL Holdem, the market would be a small fraction of its current size - 5 or 10% maybe, if that - tournaments would be fewer, and smaller, and there would be no games with TV potential.

No-limit Holdem has revealed what the wider public always knew, which is that the old games are not that attractive. They could never have generated a boom like Holdem did. The general public would have stuck to Blackjack.

But the question at hand is, would Stud with a flip be chosen as the ME game in the absence of Holdem? It's a testable claim, up to a point, and if I had the resources I would do it.

you cannot say that nobody would recognize it as the world championship. you said what would be a good replacement for the main event if flop games suddenly dissapeared or didnt exist. i chose "didnt exist" because flop games will never "suddenly dissapear".

with that in mind i was totally serious, reason being- nl 2-7 triple draw was going to be the main event until holdem took off if i remember correctly. theres no way u can justify saying what the market wouldve been without nl betting, thats all fantasy that cant be debated.

old games are attractive- poker was big before the boom, the only reason nl holdem is in the eye of the public is chris moneymakers win having a lasting effect.

Indian Poker.

y?

I remember reading somewhere that KC lowball was considered for the main event back in the early days of the WSOP before hold'em won out. Would be the best choice remaining, at least it's a NL game.

I think there is a good argument to be made that NL single draw lowball is the purest form of poker in existence, and in the absence of holdem I think it would make a fantastic main event.

But it's hard to speculate what poker would be like without games like holdem.

NL 5 card single draw.

Or NL 5 card stud.

No Limit Razz

It'd be a 5cd game under the conditions you're making up. I'd back old-fashioned 5 card draw played big bet in a tourney before your supposed automatic choice, that's for sure. TV folks would love it.

I've seen the big arguments for stud with a flip before. It's not going to happen imo.

Also, lol @ 5% if you got rid of nlhe. The live cash games were darn near what they are today if not more so playing almost exclusively limit games before money maker. Tournaments are bigger but so what. If I walked into a card room on a Tuesday afternoon when I started playing it was packed with people playing stud and limit hold em. If I walk into the same room now it's probably got a couple 1-2 hold em games going. The Main Event exploding doesn't mean poker is 20X's bigger on a day to day basis in the live card rooms. If anything it might have shrunk things.

Pfffft. Imagine Durrr bluffing at Indian Poker.

I'm surprised anyone could seriously think that lowball could be a contender, far less be widely accepted as the flag-bearer and championship game of poker. Could anyone imagine a cardroom or tournament which could thrive on lowball alone, unless it was the first poker game ever invented? If Lowball had been chosen for the ME, and used up until today, then the WSOP itself would have been irrelevant, or would become so as soon as someone started a well-marketed competing event using NL Holdem, or even five-card stud, or Draw, or both. Those two games were far more popular than lowball, until NL Holdem reduced them to a near-zero market share.

Lowball games have rarely accounted for more than a few percent of the total poker played for serious money, so backing them in a serious financial way, perhaps as a cardroom manager, or tournament innovator, would be like backing the Washington Generals, on the basis that their unbroken losing streak meant that they must be due for a win.

Suggesting that such long-term second-rank games should go all the way and take the title of world championship poker game, is correspondingly ill-founded. Even now, they can be played for a few pennies, the lowball games account for less than 1% of the online action, and usually much less: on Pokerstars for instance, as I write, there are exactly zero players on the 2-7 single-draw lowball tables, and only a couple of dozen on each of the other variations.

In regard to no-limit betting's inherent suitability for championship play, poker is first and foremost a betting game, and no-limit betting is therefore the most poker you can play: it's the full contact, bare-knuckle version of the game. Fixed-limits is the same fight, but with soft gloves.

If you consider an ante-only game in which the betting has no influence on the outcome - which is a simple lottery, or show-poker - then the cards are just tickets in a lottery. Those cards, or tickets always determine the outcome, and there is a showdown in every hand.

At the other end of the scale, no-limit betting exerts the maximum possible influence on the outcome, and the tickets or cards have the least effect. Pot-limit betting is next, then half-pot betting, then finally fixed-limits, in which cards have the greatest influence, and the betting the least, which is easily measured by the number of showdowns.

So in this crucial dimension of betting versus cards - the defeat of chance by the skill- fixed-limits is closest to being a lottery, which by definition reduces the effects of skill. .

Popularity might conceivably have trumped skill content but fixed-limits has lost the popularity battle too, and emphatically so.

Fixed-limits play, or lowball, could not have generated a television market and therefore could not have generated a poker boom like NL Holdem, because the games are unwatchable. I challenge anyone to watch several hours of Badugi for the pleasure of it - if it's painful, you lose, if it's not, seek help. And no one cares if there is bet of 1/10th or less of the pot on the river, which is what happens when a big pot is generated in a fixed-limits game Regardless of the stakes, fixed-limits just isn't interesting to watch.

Which may seem off-topic, but the point is that the WSOP ultimately succeeded because NL Holdem was the right choice: the characteristics which make it good to play also make it good to watch. if you take NL Holdem out of the equation then there really is no good choice, or at least there wasn't in 1973, and apart from Stud with a Flip, there still isn't today.
...

You ask to imagine a universe where the flop has not been invented but can't imagine a universe where low-ball is popular?

Then, in trashing the game you give a bunch of examples that are relevant in a world WITH flop games. Seriously? Oh, and then you trash its market share but propose a game with ZERO market share. Nice.

I said 5cd High fwiw, but acting like this stud game you came on here to shill is the clear-cut choice and trashing one of the more popular high stakes games, good stuff...

ETA - The WSOP got popular for a number of factors, and nlhe being the game of choice probably isn't a primary one. The economy and especially that market in the economy was thriving, they marketed the game well, and the internet took over (the poster boy for donking into the big one and winning was/is mainly a limit player fwiw). NLHE wasn't even the most popular game on the internet until after the fact. NLHE should thank the boom (tv, marketing, poker personalities that grew the game, technology/the internet, politics/economy of the time, etc) the boom doesn't owe the particular game much. It doesn't owe stud with a flop anything and never will.

PLO. Judging by the variance in that game, almost everybody can win.