Stud/8 is one of my favorite poker games, and Ted Forrest’s Stud Eight-or-Better chapter in the Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide: Tournament Edition highlights many of the game’s most interesting, and potentially profitable, facets. Stud/8 is a complex game, with a huge variety of situations that can arise, which makes it difficult to write a comprehensive strategy guide. Forrest does an admirable job of explaining hand selection, hand reading, tournament adaptation, and other key concepts in a relatively organized way.
Forrest starts by laying out an overall framework for approaching tournament Stud/8 play, which I appreciate. He advocates fundamentally tight play, as you are likely to be against skilled competition, split a lot of pots, and feel less pressure from the antes than you would in a cash game. It would be helpful to get a stronger sense of where a winning player finds his edges and what kinds of situations he seeks to create. Still, keeping this framework in mind helps readers to orient themselves towards the rest of his advice and understand its context and motivation.
The reader actually gets a more detailed and helpful framework after Forrest begins his discussion of third street starting hands. We learn that the goal in a split pot game will be to ‘scoop’, or win both the high and the low. When play is loose, this often translates into the occasional scoop with half the pot serving as a consolation prize more frequently. However, in late-game tournament situations, he argues that you are somewhat more likely to scoop a pot through sheer aggression or with a high-only hand when no one makes a low.
This leads into another central Stud/8 concept that Forrest cleverly terms the “push” and “pull” factor. Even moreso than in many other poker games, you cannot play your hand in a vaccuum. From the moment you enter the pot, you must consider others’ possible holdings and decide whether you will be better served by trying to pull them into a multi-way pot where even half could mean a juicy score or push them out and increase the likelihood that you will scoop a smaller pot.
This is such a fundamental decision, in fact, that more time ought to have been devoted to it. Some explication is forthcoming when Forrest examines how to play each type of starting hand, but I would have appreciated even more, particularly with regard to how the actions of others might influence whether you enter the pot with a raise or a call. Still, he summarizes this important difference from NLHE when he says, “aggression plays a different role than in… hold ’em tournaments. I am not looking to be aggressive for the same of aggression. I will be aggressive in two main situations: when I can push out opponents when my hand plays best heads-up, or when I have a hand for which I want to create a big pot and several other playrs have already put in a bet.”
The third street section also hints at the importance of reverse implied odds, which play a far larger role in Stud/8 than in any other fixed limit game. Forrest has much more to say about this later, but he makes clear that big mistakes begin on third street. “For opponents to outplay you, you have to become an accomplice by taking hands into situations where that can happen.”
This segues well into the first point about playing later streets, which is to get away cheaply when you brick. It’s rare to see a pot get capped on a late street in seven card stud or fixed limit hold ’em. Because of Stud/8’s split pots, however, a player who isn’t careful can find himself caught in what Forrest terms ‘the gas pipe’, where the reigning high and low hands trap an unfortunate third player into calling multiple bets to try to hit his draw on the next card.
He goes on to outline the kind of hand you need to take the gas pipe yourself (a strong two-way draw) or to give it to a third player (often trips or better or a made low with at least some gut shot outs to a high). Especially in a tournament, getting the gas pipe can be “excruciatingly expensive” and avoiding it may require some tight folds simply because of the risk that there will be one or more raises behind you.
One of my favorite things about Stud/8 is that it all but requires third-level thinking: what does my opponent think I have? Depending on what your opponent is showing and what you have represented, you may find yourself betting a small pair for value or checking and folding a pair of Aces on the end. Forrest explores how to save and make these extra bets on the river based on your opponent’s possible holdings and his likely perception of your hand. He even brushes on some advanced bluffs and ‘semi-bluffs’ where you attempt to ‘promote’ your weak hand into a winner for half the pot by knocking out a better one with a well-timed raise on the river.
Tournament strategy is clearly in the background of the entire chapter, but it comes to the fore at the conclusion with a dedicated section. Late in a tournament, there will be fewer multi-way pots and more opportunities to steal. Conversely, when a player, especially one on a short stack, does get involved in a pot, you need to back off of your steals quickly. These players are looking to double up or bust.
Forrest provides some helpful guidelines for recognizing when you are short or in danger of becoming short. With 7 BB’s, you can afford to see fourth and maybe fifth streets without tying yourself to the pot, provided you can get there cheaply. He offers a series of questions to help you handle these difficult decisions. With 3-5 BB’s, you’ll almost always be going to showdown and can start valuing medium pairs, ordinarily tricky hands to play, over even some strong low hands.
Playing to scoop and the dangers of the ‘gas pipe’ are such important concepts that they influence almost every decision a Stud/8 player makes and for this reason probably should have been introduced sooner and perhaps even given more explanation. Aside from these largely organizational quibbles, however, I must admit that Ted Forrest’s Stud Eight-or-Better chapter provides a clear and helpful summary of an extraordinarily complicated game. It should help NLHE players to succeed at Stud/8 in its own right and also to access quickly the Stud/8 skills that could end up improving their NLHE games in the long run.