The root of all poker

Last night, I fully intended to play my first session of deuce to the seven triple draw. The thing was, I'd been checking out various flavors of poker on the PokerStars site during the day, and forgot that the last one I'd looked at was 5 card draw. Like all good software, the PokerStars client returns you to where you were before when you reload it; consequently, I was in the 5 card draw section of the site instead of the deuce to the seven triple draw section. Being so eager to begin playing, I failed to notice this, and blithely joined a table and started playing. I soon realized my mistake, but decided to go with it. Possessing no actual facts to back me up on this, it's my contention that five card draw is the granddaddy of them all - the original version of poker from which all the variants spring. The root of all poker, if you will. One could do a lot worse than brush up one's skills in the root of all poker; it's experience that certainly won't go to waste.

I'd joined a limit table. As I've mentioned before, in limit poker, the maximum starting stack size is not terribly important; a big stack can't bully smaller stacks in the same way it can in pot limit or no limit. For this reason, the PokerStars software sets an arbitrarily high maximum starting stack size for limit games. At the table I'd joined, the maximum starting stack size was a cool million play dollars. I set my initial stack size to a reasonable size for a $5/$10 table - 200 times the big blind, or $2,000.

I rediscovered what I'd found out before - in limit games, it's hard to win a lot of money and also hard to lose a lot of money (provided you play with a modicum of skill). Over the course of a very long session, my stack hit a maximum of $2,270 about a sixth of the way through, almost equaled that again about halfway through, then went on a slow and steady decline down to $1,500. I called it a night at that point. I found it very relaxing to play 5 card draw - since the maximum number of players at a table is six, the pace of play is much faster than at 9 max tables. Limit 5 card draw is a grinder's delight; however, you'd have to grind an incredibly long time to amass a million play dollars. One thing I realize about myself after playing poker almost 3 years is that I'm not a limit player; I'm a pot limit player and a no limit player. Limit poker has limited thrills; pot limit and no limit have unlimited thrills. I'm a thrill seeker at heart.

During current 5-Card Draw session you were dealt 200 hands
Pots won if drawing - 29 of 136 (21%)
Pots won at showdown - 25 of 57 (43%)
Pots won without showdown - 5

delta: $-500
balance: $2,013,632