Stud-Horse Poker

I'm goin' down the river, down to New Orleans.

They tell me everything's gonna be alright,

But I don't know what alright even means …

- Bob Dylan



In Bruce Olds' historical novel Bucking the Tiger, Doc Holliday opines with conviction: "Five Card Stud – one down, four up – is the cleanest, the clearest, and the only true game. It requires more instinct, more judgment, and more raw nerve than any other form. The rest is for amateurs and with extreme prejudice to be scrupulously avoided." He reached this conclusion around 1880, the height of what Mark Twain called the Gilded Age, the time of the Robber Barons, of using any means necessary to gather a personal fortune – a rapacious national mindset that fit Doc and stud like a glove.



John Henry Holliday (1851-1888) began his professional life as a Doctor of Dental Surgery in humid Atlanta. At 20, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and told he had a few months to live, longer if he moved to a dry climate. Taking this bull by the horns, Holliday headed for Dallas, where his career in dentistry was cut short when he coughed blood onto patients. Seeing no alternative, he became a faro dealer and, later, a stud artist. And because most lawmen were more interested in arresting gamblers than protecting them, he also trained himself as a gunfighter. His weapons of choice were a 10-gauge double-barrel sawed-off shotgun and a wood-handled Colt .45.



According to one friend, U.S. Marshal Wyatt Earp, Holliday didn't take long to become "the most skillful gambler, and the nerviest, fastest, deadliest man with a six-gun I ever saw." Since Holliday knew the TB would kill him slowly and gruesomely, a bullet to the heart would be almost welcome, which went a long way toward making him fearless in a shootout. And as those who played stud with him learned at some cost, fearlessness also confers big advantages at the poker table.



But the more sore losers the volatile Holliday outdrew, the farther west he had to skedaddle, scrupulously avoiding the latest posse trying to track him down with extreme prejudice. For almost 14 years he managed to stay ahead of both TB and the noose. In October 1881 he won $40,000 in a Dodge City stud game before once again lighting out – this time with the Budapest-born madam "Big Nose" Kate Horony riding beside him – for Tombstone, where he backed up the Earp brothers in a showdown with Ike Clanton's gang at a place called the OK Corral. Holliday and two of the Earps were wounded, but every one of the Clanton boys who didn't run away was shot dead.



Doc and the Earps, along with other gunslinging poker studs like Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and Wild Bill Hickok, became icons of our westward expansion, no matter how viciously immoral they may have been in real life. These days, their card sense and killer instinct are summoned in tournaments called the Deadwood Shootout and Texas Hold'em Showdown, in monikers such as Kid Poker and Texas Dolly, even in cerebral advice books featuring a Colt .45 on the covers – since a sawed-off shotgun might trigger less nostalgia for our sepia-toned cowboy past.



Five-card stud first cropped up in the 1864 American Hoyle, and may have been played as early as 1850. The name came from stud-horse, usually the most prized possession of a rancher or breeder, which reflects poker's westward push with a decidedly masculine ring. David Parlett calls it "a cowboy invention said to have been introduced around Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois." With all of the stud farms in bluegrass country, however, the game's foaling place may well have been in Kentucky.



Whatever its provenance, stud called for one card facedown and another faceup, followed by a round of betting, then additional rounds after the third, fourth, and fifth cards. With twice as many betting opportunities as draw, stud produced larger pots – but not twice as large, since both variants were usually played either pot-limit or "table stakes," meaning that on any round, a player could bet whatever he'd had on the table when the hand began.



Stud's main appeal was that its four "open" cards gave you more information. In draw, you knew an opponent either had jacks or better or was willing to call or raise the opening bet, then how many cards he replaced. Stud players knew fully half of every opponent's hand before deciding how to proceed, and that no cards could be replaced with potentially better ones; then, before each new round of betting, they saw an ever larger fraction of the hands, allowing smart players to narrow down their opponents' likeliest holecards. Deductive reasoning and bet-to-pot ratios were at least as important as bluffing.



When the seven-card version appeared later in the century, it tempted thousands – eventually tens of millions – of players to switch from draw and "short stud." The new sequence began with two cards facedown and one faceup, followed by a round of betting; then a fourth card ("fourth street") faceup, followed by another round; and the same after fifth, sixth, and seventh street. That the seventh card was dealt facedown gave rise to its nickname, Down-the-River, with its echo of "sold down the river," meaning cruelly betrayed. (The phrase originally referred to the fate of troublesome slaves in border states punitively sold to planters in the Deep South, where working conditions were even harsher.) Down-the-River was duly shortened to "the river," which eventually stuck as a synonym for the final community card in the "flop games," even though that card is dealt faceup.



With five rounds of betting, seven-stud plays best with limited bet sizes, which double on the final three streets. The river being dealt "down and dirty" makes for a more balanced 4-3 ratio between exposed and hidden cards, giving this variant a larger sweet spot – more overlap between reading and bluffing and quant skills. That seven-stud hands develop so gradually further tips the balance in favor of reckoning talent and against wild aggression.



According to James Wickstead's How to Win at Stud Poker (1938), there is also "a philosophical side" to the game, though most of his insights can be applied to other variants. Wickstead, a psychologist and mathematician, was writing for short-stud players looking for convivial entertainment in the waning years of the Depression; if their evening was modestly profitable, so much the better. But the goal was never to clean out your tablemates, most of whom were your friends. Cheating them would be unimaginable – certainly not in the spirit of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, a poker term he employed to publicize his radical plan to help the "forgotten man at the bottom of the barrel." In much the same vein, Wickstead advised: "Establish a strict limit, either for bet sizes or the total amount a player can lose for the evening." Either type of restriction, or both, can act "as a 'governor' and is more consonant with equity and fairness."



Roosevelt set the tone for all this. To unwind after his grueling days managing a depression and then a world war, the crippled president played stud for low stakes nearly every evening in his second-floor study. Though Eleanor refused to play any game for money, regulars included advisors Harry Hopkins and Edwin Watson, presidential secretary – and mistress – Marguerite LeHand, and Eleanor's cigar-smoking journalist lover Lorena Hickok. Whatever Kenneth Starr might think of this lineup, it's obvious that neither Hickok nor LeHand required a poker nom de guerre.



Much like the revered president, Wickstead believed lower limits, besides being more fair, made it easier to play good poker. "Oftentimes a player's game is ruined due to the fact that … the limit is too steep to permit a free and easy style of play." Worse, he "loses his ability to diagnose the simplest hands and, as a consequence, becomes prey to fear" – when the only thing he should have to fear, of course, was fear itself. Unlimited betting, writes Wickstead, "is the feature that ultimately ruins most players, robbing the game of that zestful pleasure without which it becomes merely an expression of gambling." Though Wickstead doesn't mention it, unrestrained gambling on the stock market was what triggered the Depression in the first place.



As far as tactics are concerned, Wickstead recommends what today is called a tight-aggressive approach. First and foremost: "unless your hole card, paired will beat any 'up' card in an opponent's hand if that 'up' card were paired, throw your hand in the discard." Never slow-play a high pair, a tactic he calls "lying and lying in wait." "If the boys show an inclination to outdraw you when you have a good pair, charge them for the privilege." To do otherwise "is presumption of the cards' mercy, as it were. You have to treat the cards properly," he continues, "if you want them to win for you, 'sitting on them,' inviting disaster, is the eighth 'deadly sin.'"



Its democratic flavor notwithstanding, poker is a game for rugged – and non-colluding – individuals. "Every contestant should play his own hand, and two persons should never have identical interests in the same pot." We should also resist raising the stakes near the end of the evening, usually at the insistence of friends with a double-or-nothing complex. They've already lost enough by playing badly, getting unlucky, or both, and there's no reason to think either problem will be solved by playing higher.



Finally, Wickstead discourages each player from thinking the others have ganged up on him: "it certainly is no particularly pleasant satisfaction to Bill Smith to know that Izzy Cohen outdrew Mike McCarthy one time in a stud game. 'It buttered no parsnips' of Bill's, especially when Mr. Smith was in the game at the same time, and leveling, too!"



Compare Wickstead's melting-pot esprit de corps to Holliday's Rule No. 20: "Play to win, or don't bother. Check friendship at the door. A 'friendly' game is a misnomer. If what you are looking for is recreation or entertainment, there is the theater. If what you want is camaraderie, there is the bar. If it is companionship you seek, there are any number of likely whores." Or to this, from Rule 21: "Played properly, poker is hard work." In Holliday's time and for many decades afterward, friendly and cutthroat poker were mutually exclusive. (The reasons this is no longer true on the tournament circuit are a subject for a much later chapter.)



By 1891, "stud-horse poker" was widespread and maybe unfriendly enough to be banned by section 330 of the California Penal Code. When draw was declared legal there in 1911, stud's popularity waned further, though it continued to flourish back east. Meanwhile, several high-low variants, all designed to give more players an interest in the pot, had begun to appear around the turn of the century. In Low Chicago, the player with the lowest spade – the ace counting as 1 – received half the pot. Games with an eight-or-better "qualifier" stipulated that all five low cards be lower than 9. In Kansas City Lowball, aces, straights, and flushes were high, so the best possible hand was 7-5-4-3-2 unsuited.



Five-card stud high was the main variant played in 1949 by Johnny Moss and Nick "The Greek" Dandalos in their five-month winner-take-all match hosted by Benny Binion in Downtown Las Vegas. Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Lyndon Johnson all played five-stud, the game that determined who was The Man in the showdown between Eric Stoner and Lancey Howard in The Cincinnati Kid, released in 1963 but set in Depression-era New Orleans.



In our time, the short game Parlett called "the simplest and, by general consent, dullest variety" in 1990 has given way to seven-card stud. That game is spread most often in northeastern home games and cardrooms, though there's plenty of action in California, Nevada, Europe, and cyberspace. Even so, none of the 19 annual championships on the World Poker Tour call for stud; each one is solely a no-limit hold'em affair, as is nearly every World Series of Poker event on ESPN. Stud requires too much memory, is too hard to film compared with hold'em's five neatly centered boardcards, and lacks the relentless all-in action beloved by TV's demographic. In race after race, the hold'em dealer's anonymous right hand takes the place of an arbitrary Caesar tantalizing the Colosseum's bloodthirsty mob: thumbs up or thumbs down on the river?



Another measure of stud's prestige is the WSOP schedule, which has heavily favored Texas hold'em since the tournament was created – by Texans – in 1970. Five-stud was dropped in 1975, and this year only seven of the 54 events will be high or high-low seven-stud, though another five will be mixed games involving either half or three-fifths stud. But while the $10,000 finale remains no-limit hold'em, the event viewed by most professionals as poker's true championship is the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. tournament, three-fifths of which involves stud. With two smaller equine events in 2007 and more planned for coming years, it's clear that this challenging mixed game is spurring a "stud-horse" revival.



Next: The Poker World is Flat.