While the exact rules of five-card draw may vary based on where you play, these are the most common basic rules to follow.

There are no community cards in this poker variant and no one will see your hand until showdown (after the final round of betting).Įach game of five-card draw is relatively quick compared to other poker games because there are so few betting rounds and drawing rounds. Some house rules dictate how many cards you can replace from your starting hand. The players have to decide how many of their cards they want to keep and the number of cards they want to replace to try to improve their hand. In five-card draw, the dealer gives each player a starting hand of five-cards. The goal of the game is to create the highest ranking poker hand made up of five-cards.

What’s the difference between 5-card draw and 5-card stud?įive-card draw poker is a form of poker that you can play with a single 52-card deck and between two and five players.

Developing a winning 5-card draw strategy.

Our opponent plays extremely face up on the final street and we can pick up pots as a bluff.

(Note that this applies purely to no-limit 5-card draw games and it's nearly always going to be a mistake to call a raise preflop with a straight-draw or flush-draw in a limit game)

Our opponent just can't fold at showdown and hence we have great implied odds.

We don't want to make hard and fast rules here but there are some exceptions vs passive opponents where we can get away with cold-calling these hands for one of the two following reasons in a no-limit-game

The exception is that there are already 2 limpers in the pot, in which case it's fine to limp behind some straight-draws and flush-draws, but gut-shots should typically be folded. It may seem attractive to be dealt 4-to-a-straight or 4-to-a-flush, but we usually won't hit them often enough to make up for our preflop investment. In most cases we should avoid drawing to flushes and straights.

Poker 5 card draw what beats what