In this installment of my blog I am going to write about my favorite game, Stud 8/B. Stud 8/B is played like 7 card stud, except the pot is split between the high and the low hand. A low hand is qualified by 5 cards 8 or lower. When reading the best low hand, always read from highest card to lowest.

Ex. 87432 is better than 8752A

Some people get hung up on the fact that the latter hand has an ace in it, but the important key is to read the hand from highest to lowest and the lowest number wins. Now that we have a brief explanation of the game I am going to show you some extremely bad spots to be in, that might look pretty, but they are not.

High pairs

These hands look nice, but in fact they are one of the hardest hands to play in this game. A person going low can easily back into the high, but the high will seldom back into the low. This is also magnified by the fact that the key to the low hand is the Ace. High pairs should commonly be discarded in early position on 3rd street, unless almost the entire field has high cards showing, and even then if there is an Ace or two showing its an easy fold. The times to play these hands are in late position and when you can get the pot
heads up. This will rarely happen in lower stakes games. We will comment on them after we finish up a few hand examples.

3 to a flush without 2 low cards

I see this hand overplayed at least once every time I play. Without 2 decent low cards, 3 card flushes are the suck. They are even worse when 2 or more of the suit is dead. Stud 8 is truly a game of live cards. If one of your suit is out, the hand is still playable as long as it has something else working for it like two low cards to a wheel.

3 high connected cards

Hands like KQJ are poor starting hands in Stud 8/B. The only time you would consider playing this hand is in late position for an ante steal, particularly when the players left to act have high cards themselves. Once again, this is a situation that will not happen very often in lower stakes games, where many players peel until 5th street or later.

Razz hands

Razz hands look like 762, 852, etc. These hands have absolutely no high value so they are best played when not very many lows are out and cheaply in position. Through out my time of playing Stud 8, these hands have probably cost me the most. While they look pretty, they don’t how much value since they really can only win one side of the pot. The key to low hands revolve around have outs to the high hand. When a low hand is accompanied by a flush or straight draw, the hands becomes much more powerful. It’s very important to be aggressive with these types of hands. On the other hand, its also very important to understand when to pull and push. The concept of push vs. pull was something that I learned while reading Mike Cappelletti How to Win at Omaha High-Low Poker. The basic idea is to push when you want the pot to be HU and pull when you have a lock and other weak players are going to commit more money to a with vastly inferior hands. This could cover an entire article and one that I will write one of these days.

Playing in loose passive lower stakes games

In games like Limit Hold’em it is often correct to play slightly looser in loose passive games. Nothing could be father from the truth in Stud 8/B. It is correct to play even tighter in loose games, since you can almost never win the antes with a raise and so few hands actually play well in multi-way pots. A lot of good hold'em players think the opposite and will get crushed in this game. I actually remember a thread on FTR a few years ago, when a poster was convinced that throwing 772 away on 3rd street against all of these douche bags was throwing money out the window and nothing could be further from the truth.

Example of Hands that plays well multi-way

Suited babies, A25 of hearts or A47 of spades
Rolled up trips
Low hands with straight potential 765, 654, 532,
A pair of Aces with a smaller kicker(To a lesser extent as they do play better HU)
An Ace as a door card is valuable for leverage reasons and a pair of Aces in the hole is valuable for deceptive reasons.

With all situations in Stud 8, the hand goes down a lot in value when the cards you need to hit are dead. This mostly pertains to flush and straight draws.