OP your an idiot. You said imagine a world without NL or flop games, yet when people suggest other games u bash those games and compare them to holdem? How can you do that in a world where holdem and flop games dont exist?

Further-more (as i said earlier but you obviously dont read) the reason the WSOP gained fame and success was because Chris Moneymaker- a mans man- won the main event from an online sattelite seat he won. This is what sparked interest in NL holdem. Before the "Moneymaker" effect the popular game was LIMIT variations.

Atleast do some research before you bring in absurd claims and ask to play silly fantasy games about a world where NL holdem doesnt exist then continuously compare games to NL holdem in that world.

No limit razz doesn't seem like that terrible of an idea.

IMHO PLO and all limit games play terribly as tournament formats.

Part of the reason NLHE is so popular is how well it plays as a tournament game.

Concern yourself less with what has historically been popular or what is currently popular and more with what games might play well as tournaments. In the end that is what makes people play them or not play them.

5-card draw imo.

Again, would you really consider investing money into Razz, (far less NL Razz) in preference to say, Stud, as a cardroom operator, or tourney innovator? I don't get it, and I don't think that would run well with a casino or online provider, or investors, if you put that down as your intended strategy if you were looking for a job, or backing, even if Holdem didn't exist. In mixed games (so I heard, somewhere in Anecdote-town) some players routinely sit out when Razz is dealt. I don't think anyone does that when NL Holdem, or even Stud, is dealt, and there must surely be reasons for that. And as one expert put it, he loves it when the Razz rotation comes around. not because he likes the game itself one bit - he doesn't - but because most players are completely hopeless at it.
I agree 100%, maybe more. ;-). The tournament qualities of different games are not equal, and NLHE is by far the best tournament game on the list.
It's certainly a major factor, but that is what I am putting forward: NL Stud with a flip is an excellent seven-card NL game, and 7-card NL games account for about 95% of tournament action, or whatever the proportion is. That's why it would be the natural choice for the ME if Holdem was not available.

I have to consider aspects of the historical market, because if you don't understand history, you have little or no chance of fully understanding the current situation, or of looking ahead. Unfortunately, perhaps the greatest lesson to be taken from poker history is that the most obvious ideas can take centuries to be absorbed into poker, or even transferred from one bluffing game, or poker variation to another: for instance, the 400 year gap between the invention of Poch, and the invention of Draw, and the complete absence of "spare" hole-cards in Stud and it's variations, even though they have proved successful in the flop games, ie, in omaha, as well as producing a variety of playable games like the pineapples, and others. Knowing that makes puts the delay in recognition of the value of the two-card flip, and the four-rounds of betting, and the use of five upcards, into perspective.

Thanks for your comments, and I'm glad to know that not everyone thinks the success of NLHE is a random event.

RAZZ ALL UP IN DIS ****

Pineapple

NL 5 card draw. That's what people immediately thought of when they heard "poker" 10+ years ago, and for some (read: old) people even now, and it's not a bad game.

OP your debates have strayed from your original post, therefor i must label this thread a fail. GG

No limit razz would be completely terrible. The main problem would be that it would be very easy for a complete novice to completely negate the advantage of an expert by going all in any time he had a "decent" razz hand (say, a 3 card 8 under most circumstances barring unfavorable up cards). 678 isn't really a dog to A23 in razz, they're about even and with a few favorable cards 678 can be a favorite. Such circumstances are fairly rare in most other games. Pot limit might be OK.

I am totally serious about NL2-7 though. If you think it's not a viable candidate then I almost have to assume you've never played it seriously. It's a game that is nearly purely about tendencies and very little about cards.

Thread is just a shill for his game. I've seen the same thread in stud/other poker he just dressed it up with the main event scenario to try to pass it off as a question (he gives the "answer" in the first post and ignores the other obviously right answers...including the one with historical basis i.e. it almost was the Main Event) instead of an advertisement. There's no theory involved and it's not a genuine question about what major tourneys would look like without nlhe. It's a commercial for his preferred game looking for agreement/interest.

hahaha yea so true. its so idiotic how he wants views on a world without NLHE, then when someone shares their view he bashes it and compares it to NLHE. Dudes a nutjob.

Pai Gow

OK, I agree I've confused the issues, and switched from one hypothetical to another without due care and attention. I regret that, and the inconvenience and confusion it caused, but I can't guarantee that everything I say will be absolutely clear, at least not without some efforts made to actually understand it. . I am trying though.

I've also overstated the case for poker being a complete wasteland without NLHE: If Holdem hadn't been around in 1973 then Draw and the two Studs would have continued to attract players, as they had for the previous century or so, and the advent of tournament play, the internet and TV poker would have generated a much bigger market. I've played plenty of all three games, and if HE wasn't around, I still would be.

Either Draw, or five-card stud would most probably be the ME game, with my vote going to NL five-card stud. I can't see any form of lowball being the sole deciding game, but it presumably would have found a place if the ME was run as a mixed-game event, and the same goes for 7cs. (BTW, if Doyle can point out that lowball draw was famous for sending people crazy, and that the game seemed to attract a particular personality type, why can't I point out some of the other faults of the game - which may explain why it drives people crazy?)

But without NLHE, the growth in the poker market wouldn't have been nearly as great as it actually was, and the difference is due to quality of the game's design.

To defend against the possible inference that I'm a troll for saying that, and a shill for suggesting the design improvements seen in Holdem also work for Stud, let's go to Analogy-town, in which Soccer plays the role of Poker generally, and field-hockey plays the role of seven-card Stud.

No one disputes that the rule changes made to soccer in past decades have made a massive improvement to the game, which has generated billions of extra dollars in revenue, and corresponding increases in player payments, audience size, and so on. At the same time, technology and a bigger population would have ensured that the game grew anyway, even if it hadn't made those changes. But the rule changes were important and valuable, because they ensured more goals were scored, that attacking play was rewarded, and that the game was faster. (The rule changes were that the goalkeeper's rights were reduced, and that a win was worth three points, a draw only one.)

So the design changes made to Soccer improved the game and created billions of dollars worth of extra revenue. No one thinks of me as a troll when I say that old Soccer was seriously inferior to the modern game: I've played them both, and watched plenty, and there is no comparison.

But (In Analogy-town...) if I suggest that a similar game that I enjoyed, and used to play myself, could be improved by making similar design changes (where applicable) I am in effect told that no, field hockey is great as it is, and that the design changes seen in Soccer have nothing to do with it's massive success. And I'm a shill for saying anything about it, even though I have no patent on the idea or game, nor any books to sell. (Though I might expect some kudos and opportunities if my views are accepted. )

As it turns out, the three-points for a win rule also works very well in field hockey, so design improvements which work in one game often work equally well in games based on similar principles.

All that is true, and as far as I know, no one seriously disputes it. So why do people choose to upset themselves when I point out the same things about Poker? That is, that the rule changes, and improved design seen in Holdem are the reason that it has replaced other poker games, and created such a huge market?

If I say the same things about Flat Poker and Draw, there won't be any complaints: the rule changes made to Flat Poker led to a massive increase in the market, because Draw poker has a superior design - most importantly in a five-card game, it has a draw to five cards at the second round - which not only led expert gamblers to abandon their pre-existing games, it attracted players who would never have played the old game. No one disputes that, and insists that Flat Poker is a great old game, and that I shouldn't say anything bad about it. The only difference is that there are no Flat Poker players left - though a few of them were still trying to get games going decades after Draw had made their game obsolete.

So all this is "too soon" for those who leap to the defence of more recently obsolete games, and act as if I'm beating an old pensioner to death if I breathe a word of criticism of those games which, as I say, I am very familiar with and used to like very much: I would happily play Draw and 5cs (pot-limits) with any of the responders who are defending them, and expect to win.

My position is simply that the design features which work so well in Holdem - the four round length, five upcards, and a draw to five cards at the second round - also work in Stud. And (shill alert!!!) so too does the design feature of Omaha, namely the use of extra hole-cards, which are excellent in STud too, if you know how to deal them properly, but that's another story.

Poker players are very conservative in some respects, and you only have to consider that it took 7-card Stud fifty or sixty years to catch up to Draw and Five-card stud, and quite a while for Holdem to get wider recognition. With that in mind, the delay in recognizing the value of no-limit Stud with a flip is not that surprising.

I have to admit that my total play of all forms of lowball amounts to maybe 100 hours: I've thought about it for longer than that, and have some random thoughts, if you are interested:

1. Almost all the poker ever played - all but a few percent, tops - has involved the use of pairs. Those are what players have always wanted to play poker with, and Brag too for that matter. Pairs are also used in slot machines, in roulette, keno and in many other games. The use of pairs in lotteries goes back thousands of years: Homer's Iliad has an excellent description of a "name-in-the-helmet" lottery, where the aim was to make a pair between one player's name, and the name which was shaken out of the helmet: it's at chapter 7-150. Ajax won, BTW.

So favoring lowball is swimming against the most powerful and ancient tide in lottery-based games, which is the use of pairs. Why should pairs be so ubiquitous? Because they are powerful and efficient indicators of rarity value. In a lottery-based game (except in the simplest two-players, two-cards case): pairs always have more rarity value than unpaired cards, which only gain rarity value when used in longer combinations. So pairs provide maximum value in a very small combination: they are solid bricks of value in their own right, and also have the capacity to retain that value while drawing. Unpaired combinations are more like straw, or sticks, which only gain value when assembled into a longer combinations, and are worthless until then.

So pairs are the basic lottery combination, and bluffing games in general are modified lotteries which have bets after the draw, or draws. Bluffing games have always been based on lottery combinations, that is, those generated by the rank and file structure of a book of lottery tickets, which generates sequences, suits and pairs, as well as their opposites, namely lowball hands, and primes.

As you once pointed out, high poker is really a form of high-low, by virtue of straights and flushes being lowball hands (in A-5 lowball, anyway). That's the reason the high-poker ranking system is superior to lowball: it gives value to both paired and unpaired combinations, and extracts value from all parts of the deck, and all lengths of combination. So high-poker has what lowball has, plus much more. Lowball gives real value to only about 9/13 of the deck, and only one length, and one type of combination. So a lot of the deck may as well be blank, and unless you have five good cards, you don't have anything. In high-poker, if you miss one hand, you can hit another, and a single pair can be a strong hand, and even a high-card, or small pair, can have enough show-down value to warrant calling a pot-sized bet on the river, sometimes. So players aren't always "hitting to the nuts and coming up with garbage" which is one reason Doyle gave for why so many lowball players go crazy, as in certifiably, lock up and medicate, crazy.


2. Poker is going through the same revolution seen in Whist/bridge and solitaire/freecell, and no doubt some other card games, where as much information is revealed as possible by (in effect) turning cards face-up until the game stops improving. In all three cases, the result has been a huge improvement. And consider how bad Gin would be if we discarded face-down instead of face-up. Information, if revealed in the right way, has a huge effect on the playing qualities of a game. Draw is a near-perfect exploitation of a limited principle, and it's great weakness is that it can't incorporate exposed cards without changing the game completely. So a preference for Draw games is, again, swimming against the tide, which in card games of skill tends towards revealing as much information as possible by using exposed cards.

3. I know you have put forward arguments in favor of the 2-7 system over the A-5 system: my observations on the 7-2 system are firstly that it puts too much value on two cards, because you have to have a 2 and a 7 in order to have a quality drawing hand. So the value in the deck is not only all at one end, with the higher cards being effectively blank, you also have to have two specific low cards in order to have a playable drawing hand. So the ban on straights means that a lot of low hands are unplayable: Secondly, while the ban on straights might have some benefits - I take your assurance that it does at face value - the ban on flushes serves no purpose at all, and simply reduces the number of playable hands, and therefore the total action. It's blind adherence to tradition. Players want to play, and arbitrarily removing otherwise excellent hands from play does not let them do that as often as they could. And while a few might like it because they regard it as the "real" lowball, I would guess that for most, it's just another of those things which ensures that it will always be a minority interest, IMO.

I have to agree with Rusty 100% on NL 2-7. It has all the excitement of huge-bet poker and gazillions of bluffing opportunities. And as Rusty said, some consider it the purest form of poker. Certainly it has the things that the public at large thinks poker is all about, playing the player, big bluffs, trapping.