Some of the old LHE players I play with want to ressurect the stud game at our casino, which traditionally did 1-5 SL. I suggested we make it FL 3/6 or 4/8, and I'm wondering how we should approach antes and the bring-in.

If we get an 8 handed 3/6 game, is $0.50 ante and $1 bring-in about right or is the ante too high? What are thoughts on button antes to keep quarters out of the game (we'd be using actual quarters, yuck)?

Typical stud ante in a 4-8 structure is ante 1, bring 1, 4-8. Typical for a 3-6 would be ante .50, bring 1, 3-6, which is awkward for a number of reasons, not least being .50 chips.

For a 3-6 structure you could use "blinds" where a button moves and the first two players put dead money in, (or have the button ante for the table) but then you have to make sure everybody plays a complete orbit, which may be difficult to enforce and makes short-handed play higher ante structure than full ring. This structure is used in a lot of home games where peer pressure keeps everybody in line. In a public room, not a good mechanism.

Much easier to keep it 1-1-4-8 so you only need one kind of chip.

1-1-4-8 is a pretty large ante structure for a low limit game. Stealing antes offers over 2:1.

0.5-1-3-6 sounds like a pretty solid low limit structure to me.

foxwood's 5/10 is 0.50 ante, $2 bring in, (very low antes). It just uses 50cent pieces.

I thought 1-1-4-8 sounded kind of large as well. I don't think they'd go for that large an ante. Trying to keep in friendly so we can actually get it off the ground.

1-1-4-8 mimics the structure of the bigger limit games and simplifies everything by only requiring one kind of chip on the table, makes it easy to get the games up and running with no fuss. If you want a smaller ante you'll need to have change on the table, and cash isn't allowed to play in quite a few casinos, so you'd need new small denomination chips or something like a button ante.

You could do it by having everybody except the "button" pay an ante, and the ante-skip button would rotate, but man is that a weird way to do it. I've never heard of it happening, just thought of it now. It would work I guess but still stupid.

Yeah but the problem is people sitting down to a low limit friendly game, which are usually also raked proportionally higher, are going to run out of money pretty quickly if they are playing their normal passive strategy.

The ante money just gets pushed back and forth across the table until somebody wins a pot, assuming there's a no flop no drop policy.

There aren't a lot of no 4th street hands at low limit.

I mean a high ante game necessitates aggressive play. Most casual players aren't aggressive, and they won't change strat to adjust for ante structure. So whether they're loose passive or tight passive, they lose money faster regardless.

If it's a group of mostly solid regs who just want to have a good time, a higher ante game is more fun. Though do consider that rake limits will also be reached faster.