Several days ago I wrote about seven card stud advanced stratgies. I talked about how you can count cards to determine your chances at making hands.

I wanted to talk about this a bit more and share some more tips with you. One tip that many people overlook is the 4 color card deck. What is the 4 color card deck? A 4 color deck makes clubs green and makes diamonds blue. So you have green clubs, blue diamonds, red hearts, and black spades. Yes it looks cheesy, however there is great strategy in it.

When playing 7 card stud you want to be able to count cards. You want to count what your opponent has and you want to compare that to your own hand. Having the color coded cards makes it even easier to count the cards. Visually it takes less time to count 4 “green” cards, than it does to look at all the black cards and determine which ones are clubs and which are spades. You can within a second determine how many of each suit is showing by simply using the 4 color card deck.

When counting cards what you want to do is compare them to the cards in your own hand. This makes it easier to keep track of.

So you’ll look in your hand. Lets say you see a pair of 10’s in your hand. Such as
10 10 and you have a
J showing. You can look around the board and determine what your opponents have facing up. Do you see any other 10’s? How many cards above 10 do you see? If you see that the cards facing up are mostly low cards then your 10s might be the highest pair… However if you see a lot of face cards, then you know that your opponents probably have higher pairs than you do.

Similarly do you see jacks? Maybe you can catch a 2nd jack. However if you see 2 jacks you know that would be a foolish play.

Now also think about your opponents. Is your opponent making strong bets? Perhaps he has two pair or 3 of a kind. Is he playing weak simply calling bets? Perhaps he is on a draw? Is he drawing for a flush? Lets say he shows a couple of clubs… And you know you have a couple of clubs in your hand, plus by counting cards you’ve counted 3 more clubs. So assuming your opponent has 4 in his hand, you have 2, and there are 3 dead clubs already played. That makes 9 of the 13 clubs in play already. There quite possibly were even some dead cards you didn’t see in opponents hands who have already folded. Your opponents chance of hitting that flush is going to be very bad.

Using these strategies you can greatly increase your odds in seven card stud.

- Fittsy

Posted by in Learn Poker, 7 Card Stud