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Stud Eight or Better Beginner Strategy

April 12, 2009

Stud Eight or Better refers to the classic poker game of 7 Card Stud in it’s popular Hi-Lo form. With an intense following, novice 7 Card Stud Hi-Lo players should learn and adapt to a solid Stud Eight or Better strategy in order to maximize profits and decrease losses at the table.

In this Stud Eight or Better beginner strategy, we will cover a few of the most basic, yet essential tactics to accomplish this goal. As you become accustomed to these strategies, we then recommend upgrading to the next levels:

Stud Eight or Better Intermediate Strategy
Stud Eight or Better Advanced Strategy

But first, it is important to take your game one step at a time. Otherwise, incorporating too many strategies at once could become overwhelming and unproductive. The basic 7 Card Stud strategies you’ll need to apply first are listed and detailed below. They include the importance of starting hand selection, over-valuing the low hand and under-valuing the door card.

Stud Eight or Better Beginner Strategy – Starting Hand Selection

In our previous article – “Stud Eight or Better Rules & Starting Hands” – we detailed the making of a good starting hand in 7 Card Stud Hi-Lo. Please refer back to this for a list of all good starting hands. It is extremely important to know what hands are worth betting on, and which ones should be folded immediately.

Too many players will take just about any hand onto 4th Street, when the smart thing to do is fold and conserve your chips for a better opportunity. The fact is, when there are several or more people gathered around the table, someone is likely to hit a good hand. If your first 3 cards don’t supply enough evidence that that person is going to be you, bow out early. Otherwise you’ll find yourself siphoning chips into one pot after another without any chips coming back to you.

Stud Eight or Better Beginner Strategy – Over-Valuing the Low Hand

Stud Eight or Better is a split pot game, meaning the player with the highest hand gets half of the pot, and the player with the lowest gets the other half. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as all that. In order to win the low hand, you must qualify with “8 or better”, meaning no card higher than 8, and no pairs or better. As we should already know, Aces are low and Straights/Flushes are not considered combos. Still, this means your hand must be somewhere between A-2-3-4-5 and 4-5-6-7-8.

When a player is dealt something like 2-3-9, A-6-T or 2-4-J, they may feel inclined to play it out simply because they have two low cards to begin with. The problem here is that the odds are totally against you. You’ll be getting 4 more cards, and 3 of them MUST be 8 or below, without pairing your other low cards. Even a hand like 2-3-4 has less than a 50/50 chance of becoming a qualifying low hand. You have a 50% chance of getting two more low cards, but the chance of them pairing decreases the odds to below 50%.

Simply put, if you bet on a low hand alone, and you don’t make your draws, you are left with absolutely nothing worth playing at the showdown. A proper starting hand must have some kind of High Hand attributes to be worth playing.

Stud Eight or Better Beginner Strategy – Under-Valuing the Door Card

A player’s Door Card can make or break their hand from the start. The Door Card is received on the initial deal, where each player receives 3 cards. The first 2 are face down hole cards, but the third is face-up, the Door Card. When you get an excellent door card – the best being an Ace – you have a chance to immediately take down the pot.

What you want to look for is every other player having a junk door card, like 10 or below. Making a strong move at this point will often result in everyone else dropping out of the pot. Why invest in something when another player is already likely to win. Maybe you only gain the Ante and Bring-In bets, but if your hole cards were junk anyway, it’s well worth it!

The Door Card is also handy in such cases where the Door Card itself sucks, but your hole cards are great. If you’re holding pocket Aces with a 6 for a Door Card, everyone will assume you to be weak. Slow play the hand by placing minimal bets and calling bets from others. Try to draw chips from as many players as possible. Other scenarios would be a hand like 2-3-6, with the 6 showing and all cards suited. This presents a Straight Draw, and Flush Draw and a good building Low Hand, yet all your opponents see is a lowly 6.

Stud Eight or Better – Upgrading Strategies

We strongly encourage novice 7 Card Stud Hi-Lo players to apply the strategies above before moving on to the next level. Once you are using these strategies with ease and success, it is then time to incorporate the intermediate level strategy, and finally the advanced level. You’ll find the links to these below:

Stud Eight or Better Intermediate Strategy
Stud Eight or Better Advanced Strategy

Written by Rob · Filed Under HORSE Poker Strategy 

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