Shuffle Up And Twist

Fun rule variations for your home game, be it cash game or tournament

In 2003, the World Poker Tour and the World Series of Poker changed the game of poker forever by bringing Texas Hold ’Em, complete with hole-card cameras, into people’s living rooms. Suddenly, you couldn’t walk two blocks around your neighborhood without coming across an in-home Hold ’Em tournament playing out on somebody’s dining room table.

Three years later, another TV show changed the game again. High Stakes Poker gave us the world’s first televised cash game, and the show was an instant smash. Suddenly, on many of those dining room tables, the cash game was back. Poker in its original form, where the chips represent actual dollars and cents and the blinds don’t escalate, was shoving tournament-style poker aside in many folks’ home games.
With HSP having returned this month for a fifth season (highlighted so far by the brilliantly creative play of budding superstar Tom Dwan), and with Poker After Dark having aired a highly engaging “Nets vs. Vets” cash game a few weeks ago, now seems a perfect time for a column about how to make your home game as exciting as the cash games you see on TV. But since many poker lovers still play tournament-style at their home games, this column will show some love to that format as well.

What follows are ideas for fun twists for your home game, be it an HSP-style cash game (at lower stakes, presumably), or a WPT-style tournament (without a $10,000 buy-in, presumably).

The 7-2 Bounty: This was first introduced on HSP and made its way over to Poker After Dark. It’s a small and simple rule change, specifically for use in cash games, that can turn Hold ’Em strategies on their ear. If someone wins a pot with 7-2, the worst starting hand in poker, everyone at the table must pay them a bounty. It doesn’t matter whether you take it down with a bluff or actually make the best hand; if you win the pot and show the rags, everyone pays up. On PAD, for example, where the blinds were $200/$400, the bounty was worth $1,000 from each player. So you could potentially have players engaging in $100,000 pots with an awful 7-2 in hopes of stealing an extra $5,000.
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Live Straddles: This is another cash game twist, designed to ratchet up the action. The under-the-gun player simply min-raises to double the big blind without looking at his cards, effectively creating a third blind. If you’re playing $1/$2 No-Limit, the live straddle is for $4, and suddenly a player who wants to open-raise is likely raising to $12 instead of $6. Needless to say, the pots can get huge very quickly.

Run It Twice: This has long been a staple of cash games, and if yours is a “friendly” home game, where the idea is not to cause financial bloodshed, this is a good way to potentially mitigate the damage in a large, all-in pot. Basically, if the two players in the hand agree that they want to hedge their bets, the dealer puts out two sets of board cards. If one player wins on both boards, he takes the whole pot and it’s the same as if you’d run it once; if each player wins on one board, you chop the pot down the middle.

[For the Complete details and more Fun changes, click the link below]

http://www.theclubservices.com/clubwpt/Membership_Benefits/tips_from_pros/wpt/archive/twist.html