Poker variants, and how to tell them apart

The three families every poker game belongs to

Poker looks like dozens of unrelated games until you notice that almost all of them sort into three groups. The grouping is not trivia. It tells you where the information is at the table, and information is what you are actually betting on.

Community-card games deal you a small private hand and turn a set of shared cards face up in the middle. Hold'em, Omaha and short deck all live here. Because most of the material is public, hand values are easy to compare and the game is readable from the first day, which is exactly why this family took over. The Texas Hold'em walkthrough covers the sequence in full.

Stud games deal every player their own cards, some face up and some face down, and share nothing. There is no board to read. Instead you track the exposed cards that have already been dealt and folded, which makes memory a real skill rather than a party trick. Seven-card stud is the game people mean by default.

Draw games deal you a complete private hand and let you throw part of it away for replacements. Five-card draw is the version most people first play at home, and it is the only one of the three families where nobody sees a single card of yours before showdown.

Sitting outside all three are the casino table games that borrow poker's hand names without borrowing its structure: three card poker, Caribbean stud, and their relatives. You play those against a dealer with a fixed paytable and a fixed house edge, so they belong in a different mental category entirely, even though the marketing puts "poker" in the name.

The main variants at a glance

This table is the short answer to "what is the difference". Everything else on this page and in the pages below it is detail hung on these six rows.

Two columns do most of the work. The number of cards you hold decides how strong hands run: more cards means more ways to make something, so what wins a pot in Omaha would be a routine fold in Hold'em. The number of betting rounds decides how expensive a mistake gets, because every extra round is another chance to put money in with the worse hand.

Betting structure changes the game more than the cards do

Two players can be dealt identical cards in identical positions and still be playing different games, because the betting cap is not a detail. It decides how much one decision is allowed to cost.

• No-limit. Any bet from the minimum up to your entire stack, at any point. Standard for Hold'em. A single hand can be for everything you have, so the skill is as much about sizing as about card reading.
• Pot-limit. The biggest bet allowed is the current size of the pot, counting your own call first. Standard for Omaha, and a deliberate brake: pots still grow enormous, but nobody can move all in on the first round.
• Fixed-limit. Bets come in set amounts, usually with a cap of a bet and three raises per round. Traditional for stud. The gentlest format to learn in, because no single error can end your session.

The same rule applies everywhere: table stakes. You can only win or lose the chips that were in front of you when the hand began, and nobody can bet you off a pot by naming a figure larger than your stack.

Where the hand rankings stop being the same

Most variants use the standard ten-hand order without changing a thing, and that order is the one to learn first. It is on the poker rules page with a full table. Three of the games below break it, and each break has an honest mathematical reason.

• Short deck removes the twos through fives. With only nine cards per suit left, flushes become harder to make than full houses, so almost every short-deck rule set ranks a flush above a full house. Some rooms go further and rank three of a kind above a straight. Check the chart before you sit.
• Three card poker compares three-card hands, and with only three cards a straight is rarer than a flush. The order flips accordingly: a straight beats a flush at that table, which catches out anyone arriving from Hold'em.
• Lowball games such as Razz, and the low half of Omaha Hi-Lo, invert the whole ranking so the worst hand wins. In the most common low ranking the ace plays low, straights and flushes are ignored, and 5-4-3-2-A is the perfect hand.

Everything else (Hold'em, Omaha high, seven-card stud high, five-card draw) uses the same ten hands in the same order, and suits never break a tie in any of them.

Which one should you actually learn

If you are starting from nothing, learn Texas Hold'em, and do not treat that as a compromise. It has the shallowest first step of any real poker game, the deepest pool of free learning material, and it is the game running at almost every table you will ever be invited to. Everything you learn about position, pot odds and bet sizing carries directly into every other variant.

Move to Omaha when Hold'em has started to feel repetitive rather than difficult. Four hole cards make every pot bigger and every hand closer in strength, so it is more fun and considerably more expensive to learn badly. Short deck is the same jump made sideways: familiar structure, unfamiliar maths, and a much faster game.

Learn stud if you like games of memory, or if you play in a mixed rotation where it comes round. And treat the casino table games as what they are — quick, sociable, with a fixed edge that no amount of study removes. That last distinction matters more than any other on this page, because it is the difference between a game you can get better at and a game you cannot.

All of them are spread online as well as at a kitchen table, and the lobby you learn in is not a neutral detail. Poker apps and club apps are two rather different things behind the same download button.

The full guide to each variant

Each of these pages covers one game end to end: the deal, the betting rounds, the hand rankings that apply, the mistakes that cost beginners money, and the maths worth knowing before you sit down.

• Texas Hold'em: two hole cards, five shared, four betting rounds. The default game, and the one to learn first.
• Omaha poker: four hole cards, and the rule that catches everyone: exactly two from your hand, exactly three from the board.
• Short deck poker: Hold'em on a 36-card pack, where a flush outranks a full house and draws hit far more often.
• Stud poker: no community cards, an ante and a bring-in, and the Caribbean stud table game that shares the name but not the game.
• Three card poker: three cards each against a dealer, with its own ranking order and a published house edge.

Whichever you pick, the money side deserves the same attention as the rules. Poker in Malaysia is restricted under the Common Gaming Houses Act 1953 and the Betting Act 1953, and there is an additional prohibition for Muslims under Sharia law. Nothing here says any particular form of real-money play is permitted where you live. If you do play for stakes, decide the amount before you sit down and treat it as spent. This site is for adults, 18 and over.