How to play 5-card draw poker (high)

This is the game you’ve probably seen in the movies – remember the fabulous poker game scam on the train in The Sting? Long before Texas Hold’em grew to its astounding present popularity, draw poker in all its many varieties was a standard game. Now you’ll find plenty of people who aren’t familiar with the rules and strategies of this easy-to-learn game, having been introduced to poker by draw’s cousins, the flop-based games.

There are many slight differences in the rules of 5-card draw high (antes or blinds? How many cards can be changed at once? How many draws are there?) but at its base it’s a game of strategically changing or keeping some of your originally dealt five cards in order to create the best five-card poker hand (see Hand Rankings).

Here is one of the most basic versions of the game, which can be learned in a matter of minutes:

Players all ante (place a small compulsory bet to get the pot started). This would be, say, $0.25 in a $1/$2 game.

First betting round: Each player is dealt a five-card hand, face down, which is theirs alone, and should be kept concealed from other players. The dealer deals to the player on his left first and himself last, one card at a time. Then there is a round of betting, starting with the player on the dealer’s left (the deal moves round the players in a clockwise fashion one place per hand). Each player in turn moving clockwise has the option to bet, call a previous bet, or raise the bet, in the lower fixed increment of the game. If you don’t want to call a bet that’s been made in front of you, you can fold at this point and sit out the rest of the hand, losing only your ante.

Then, starting to the dealer’s left, each remaining player has the option to change up to three cards for new ones from the deck (or, often, four if an Ace is shown). This is not compulsory – there is the option to keep all five original cards (‘stand pat’) if you have been dealt a good hand straight off, or want to pretend you have. The cards are dealt to the players in turn, so if the first player discards three, he is dealt three off the top of the deck before moving on to the next player.

(N.B. Depending on the number of players in the hand and how many cards they request, there may not be enough cards left in the stub of the deck to exchange. In this case, the discards are reshuffled and used to complete the changes for remaining players. Not included in the reshuffle are any discards that have been made on the round in progress where the player has not yet received his replacements, as this eliminates the possibility of a player getting the cards he’s just thrown away straight back!)

Second betting round: When everyone left in the hand has had a chance to discard, there is a second betting round, at the higher limit. At the end of this round, players reveal their hands, and the highest hand wins.

As in all high games, flushes are decided on high card (compared downwards if there is a tie), full houses are judged on the higher three of a kind and an Ace may make a straight A 2 3 4 5 or 10 J Q K A.

This is just the simplest variant of this game, with a basic set of rules commonly found in home games. When 5-card draw or its more frequently-played low variants are found in casinos, there are usually blinds posted by the player to the left of the dealer (small blind) and the player to his left (big blind) instead of, or as well as, antes. The first round’s betting would begin with the player to the big blind’s left, and the second with the player closest to the dealer’s left.

The details are flexible; there are as many varieties of draw poker and poker in general as people can think up. It is not necessary to have a limit on the number of cards a player may exchange – in fact in tournaments or casino games you can usually replace any number of cards. Homegame players seem to have a knack for inventing new games, and if you can think of a version, someone somewhere is playing it.

Varieties of this classic game include Jacks-or-better, where to open the initial round of betting your holding must be a pair of Jacks or stronger. If no one qualifies, all the cards are reshuffled and redealt and there’s another ante put in the pot, and so on until someone can open the betting. There are also games where a flop element is added, for example one communal card which must be used by all players who have four cards dealt instead of five. A homegame standard, draw poker is enjoying a quiet period in casinos but it’s good to be an all-rounder. The more varieties of poker you can pick up, the better, and there’s no simpler game to start with than good old 5-card draw.