Short Deck Poker Hands

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Short Deck Poker Hands As outlined above, because the smaller cards are removed from the deck there are much bigger hands made by players in a short deck game. Removing those other cards also changes the odds in the game, meaning certain hands change in their ranking.


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Short deck NL hold'em - also known as 6-plus hold'em - is currently enjoying another ramp up in popularity. Three or four years ago, it appeared in the public eye for the first time when the likes of Phil Ivey and Tom Dwan were reportedly playing it in nosebleed live cash games around Asia against rich businessmen.

Many players have said it's almost a hybrid of NL and PLO because of how close the equities tend to run together. A consequence of this is that all in clashes pre-flop are much more common. Perhaps more suitable for somebody looking for mobile no deposit free spins than a seasoned poker player.

  1. The total number of starting hands is reduced from 1326 to 630, and the number of unique Short Deck starting hands is only 81, compared with 169 No Limit Hold'em starting hands.
  2. Short Deck Poker - Odds calculator How to use: First insert the hands and board texture into the appropriate fields using the following format 'AhKh' (Where the first (capital) letter represents the card and the second (lowercase) letter represents the suit).

This is all because the deuces through fives are removed from the deck, leaving only 36 cards. We might be forgiven for thinking little would change, but in fact, the hand rankings are quite different. A flush now beats a full house, and three of a kind sits in front of a straight!

This makes perfect sense as instead of drawing to nine outs for a standard flush draw, you are now seeking out only five. This is a huge difference.

Why Short Deck Is an Action Game

With the hand rankings changing around slightly, we can also see that the chances of making your draw are different too.

Short

Obviously you still have eight outs to complete a straight draw, but instead of digging through 47 cards to hit jackpot, there are now only 31 to contend with. Now we will hit our straight more than 45% of the time.

Already we have seen that a flush is rarer than a full house, but we will still complete the draw more than 30% of the time, in comparison to 36% in normal NL hold'em.

Even a gutshot straight draw will be successful almost 25% of the time.

Another Rule Change

Savvy players of standard NL hold'em will be familiar with what is known as 'the rule of two and four'. In short deck games we must switch to 'the rule of three and six'.

To clarify for newer players, what we mean is on the flop we can multiply our outs by six and the result is our equity, or on the turn we multiply our outs by three to know our equity.

This shortcut works remarkably well, but does become less accurate the more outs you are counting.

Don't Be Deceived By So Many Strong Hands

All online betting sites. With only 630 starting hands possible compared to the usual 1326, we can expect to see powerhouse starting hands much more frequently. For example, pocket aces will arrive in front of you every around once every 100 hands, instead of every 221 using a full deck. Ace-king is also seen twice as often.

The problem here is that it actually becomes quite deceiving in terms of absolute strength versus relative strength. This can be illustrated by thinking about how well we view two broadway cards in normal hold'em - it's a fairly decent hand right? Playing short deck rules we will be dealt such a hand close to one third of the time!

So, if decent hands are actually the norm in this game - similar to post flop in PLO - we must be extra vigilant to not get carried away.

An Illustrative Hand

This hand illustrates the wildly different pre flop equities we witness when playing short deck hold'em. It comes from the recent Triton Poker Series in Jeju, South Korea, during a Short Deck Ante Only tournament.

Short Deck Poker Hands
Short Deck Poker Hands

Short deck NL hold'em - also known as 6-plus hold'em - is currently enjoying another ramp up in popularity. Three or four years ago, it appeared in the public eye for the first time when the likes of Phil Ivey and Tom Dwan were reportedly playing it in nosebleed live cash games around Asia against rich businessmen.

Many players have said it's almost a hybrid of NL and PLO because of how close the equities tend to run together. A consequence of this is that all in clashes pre-flop are much more common. Perhaps more suitable for somebody looking for mobile no deposit free spins than a seasoned poker player.

  1. The total number of starting hands is reduced from 1326 to 630, and the number of unique Short Deck starting hands is only 81, compared with 169 No Limit Hold'em starting hands.
  2. Short Deck Poker - Odds calculator How to use: First insert the hands and board texture into the appropriate fields using the following format 'AhKh' (Where the first (capital) letter represents the card and the second (lowercase) letter represents the suit).

This is all because the deuces through fives are removed from the deck, leaving only 36 cards. We might be forgiven for thinking little would change, but in fact, the hand rankings are quite different. A flush now beats a full house, and three of a kind sits in front of a straight!

This makes perfect sense as instead of drawing to nine outs for a standard flush draw, you are now seeking out only five. This is a huge difference.

Why Short Deck Is an Action Game

With the hand rankings changing around slightly, we can also see that the chances of making your draw are different too.

Obviously you still have eight outs to complete a straight draw, but instead of digging through 47 cards to hit jackpot, there are now only 31 to contend with. Now we will hit our straight more than 45% of the time.

Already we have seen that a flush is rarer than a full house, but we will still complete the draw more than 30% of the time, in comparison to 36% in normal NL hold'em.

Even a gutshot straight draw will be successful almost 25% of the time.

Another Rule Change

Savvy players of standard NL hold'em will be familiar with what is known as 'the rule of two and four'. In short deck games we must switch to 'the rule of three and six'.

To clarify for newer players, what we mean is on the flop we can multiply our outs by six and the result is our equity, or on the turn we multiply our outs by three to know our equity.

This shortcut works remarkably well, but does become less accurate the more outs you are counting.

Don't Be Deceived By So Many Strong Hands

All online betting sites. With only 630 starting hands possible compared to the usual 1326, we can expect to see powerhouse starting hands much more frequently. For example, pocket aces will arrive in front of you every around once every 100 hands, instead of every 221 using a full deck. Ace-king is also seen twice as often.

The problem here is that it actually becomes quite deceiving in terms of absolute strength versus relative strength. This can be illustrated by thinking about how well we view two broadway cards in normal hold'em - it's a fairly decent hand right? Playing short deck rules we will be dealt such a hand close to one third of the time!

So, if decent hands are actually the norm in this game - similar to post flop in PLO - we must be extra vigilant to not get carried away.

An Illustrative Hand

This hand illustrates the wildly different pre flop equities we witness when playing short deck hold'em. It comes from the recent Triton Poker Series in Jeju, South Korea, during a Short Deck Ante Only tournament.

The antes are 3,000 each hand,except the button who pays 6,000.

UTG limps with pocket aces and the HJ raises it up to 25,000 with AcQd. The CO calls with Js9s and while the BTN considers his move we get to see what the equities are.

UTG - AA - 30%
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HJ - AQo - 12%

CO - J9s - 32%

BTN - 22%

So J9s is actually a favourite over pocket rockets in a four-way pot. Usually, the results wouldn't look like this. Here is what we would usually see.

UTG - AA - 55%

HJ - AQo - 5%

CO - J9s - 19%

BTN - 21%

In the end, the BTN0 folds preflop and UTG then completes his original plan by jamming all-in. This how the match ups look now.

Short Deck Poker Hand Strength

UTG - AA - 49% - 263,000

HJ - AQo - 12% - 71,000

CO - J9s - 34% - 54,000

So we can see just how dramatic the differences are between the two formats.

Why Should We Play Short Deck Rules?

For a start, action games always attract players who are prepared to gamble it up. This is not only good for your overall enjoyment, but it increases potential profit too. It's also good to get involved with new games while everyone is still finding their feet. The best players at each stake level will not have had much time to increase their edge over everyone else. There's also not much information out there yet, making it a much closer contest.

Stars such as Phil Ivey heartily endorse the game. He told the media:

I started playing Short Deck recently, it has quickly become one of my favorite games. I enjoy playing it. It's fun, it's something different, it's new and there's a lot of gambling involved. The equities run pretty close, so it's pretty easy to get your money in the middle and be 50/50 or somewhere near that. It suits a more gambling style of player.'

Some starting hand tips for Short Deck Hold'em

Low connectors such as 7♣ 8♠ are going to have less value, as even if we flop a straight say on a 9♠ 10♠ J♣ board then someone could easily have Q♣ K♠ and we are going to be drawing almost dead.

Drawing hands on flush boards

Will prove less lucrative than in Hold'em for example, we have 8♠ 8♣ and the flop comes down 8♥ 10♥ K♥ in regular hold'em we still have 35% equity on this board even if our opponent has been lucky enough to flop a flush, as we can win with the board pairing or the case 8 rolling off. In Short Deck where flushes out rank full houses our equity is reduced greatly to below 7% as we will need to hit the case 8♦ and making 4 of a kind to bag the win. With other hands such as Q♠ J we have zero equity against a flopped flush, so it is a good idea to keep the pot small with these types of holdings as flushes are so strong players are likely to slow play these types of boards in the hopes of opponents like us hitting our straight draws and then putting in large bets on the river.

Don't be fooled by big pocket pairs hand strength

Hands like K K are still the second highest ranking hand however the equities run so close in this game that even against a hand such as A♦ K♦we will only drag the pot 55% of the time, compared to the 66% equity we would have with a 52 card deck.
Another eye opener for a new Short Deck hold'em player will be how much equity J
♣ 10 has even against the strongest of holdings, such as A♦ A♠ we will win this around 40% of the time, around double our chances of that in regular hold'em where we would have 21.5%

Weak Ace High hands have poor playability in Short Deck

In regular No limit Hold'em an offsuit Ace high hand such as A♠ 8 would make us a favorite over a suited hand such asQ♦ K♦ in Short Deck hold'em the opposite is true, holding the suited connector would make us a 57% favorite over the Ace high hand. In general, we want to be playing the low offsuit combinations of Ace high rarely and if at all not in bloated pots, as there is never really a great outcome for playing a hand such as A♠ 8
For example
, if the flop comes A
8♦ J♦this can be deceiving for a modest player as a good flop, we have two pair! Great, Right?! Hmm, not really, these are dicey waters in Short Deck poker, say at worst our opponent is going to continue with a hand like A♥ Q♥ even against this hand we only have a small edge with 53% in equity. The dangerous part about continuing with a board like this in Short Deck is that there aren't many good turns or river cards for our hand, any next card makes straights or better two pairs possible, any diamond makes a flush possible, if the Jack on the board pairs we will have our two pair counterfeited.

Short Deck Poker Hands Signals

Pick good bluff candidates

Middle and bottom pairs are great semi-bluffing hands in Short Deck Hold'em because these pairs have less showdown value and so you are less incentivized to try to check down with them. When called you are more likely to improve your hand as there are fewer cards in the deck.

Have a mixed limping strategy

Limping into pots with a balanced range of strong, medium and weak holdings can not only allow you to see cheap flops with hands that play well on certain boards like suited connectors and pocket pairs trying to connect, but you can also balance this strategy by including hands like AK♣, K♣ K and Q♠ Q in your limping range, along with weak holdings such as 6♣ 7♣ and hands of this nature will serve two purposes.

Short Deck Poker Hands Clip Art

Allows us to limp, 3bet for value VS any aggressive players that are raising hands such as A♣ J and pairs such as 10♠ 10 profitably and play bigger pots with a strong range advantage or just pick up the pot pre-flop with even more dead money after the raise and any calls that followed.

Short Deck Poker Hands Signs

The second part of this strategy that can be very lucrative for us, is playing a Pot with a deceptively strong hand after the flop, for example if we include Q♠ Q♣ into our limping range and the flop comes A♠ Q♦ 8♦ and our opponent has a hand like A♠ 8 then we are well disguised and set to win some bets from our opponent.

Short Deck Poker Hands Clip Art

Want to play Short Deck Hold'em?

Short Deck Poker Hands Games

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Short Deck Poker Strategy






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