Deuce-Seven Triple Draw
Forty-five events! Yes, you heard right; you have 45 chances to claim a piece of poker history. However, not all of the events are Hold’em. In order to beat the best of the best, you need to hone your skills in all forms of poker. So start brushing up on your Omaha 8, and Seven Card Stud, and your Deuce-Seven Triple Draw. Deuce-Seven Triple Draw? Yeah, we didn’t know how to play either, so we dug up the rules. Here’s how it works…
Deuce-Seven Triple Draw Poker Rules
Deuce-Seven Triple Draw is a five-card draw low game. Each player is dealt five cards and the goal is to make the lowest possible five-card hand. There are four rounds of betting and three draws in this game. After each round of betting, players choose cards to discard – anywhere from zero to five, and they are dealt replacement cards. After the third and final draw, there is one last round of betting. A dealer button determines the order of betting and discarding.
Hand rankings
In Deuce-Seven Triple Draw, players try to make the lowest possible five-card hand. Aces play for high only, and deuces play for low. Because you are trying to make the lowest possible hand, straights and flushes count against you. This means that 2-3-4-5-6, for example, is a very bad hand. It is not considered a 6-low. It is a straight, and is therefore worse than holding A-K-Q-J-9.
The best possible hand you can make is 2-3-4-5-7 with no flush. This hand is called a wheel. The next best hand is 2-3-4-6-7, again with no flush. This hand is often referred to as Number 2. Likewise, 2-3-5-6-7 is referred to as Number 3, and so on.
Because aces play for high, 2-3-4-5-A is not a straight. It is the best possible ace-low you can make – also called the Nut Ace. And 2-3-4-5- 8 is the Nut 8; 2-3-4-5-9 is the Nut 9, and so on. So A-K-Q-J-9 is the worst possible unpaired hand you can make, since your goal is to make a low hand; 2-2-3-4-5 would be the next best hand after that. Trips are worse than pairs. Straights are worse than pairs and trips. Flushes are worse than straights. And full houses are worse than flushes. The worst hand you can hold in this game is a Royal Flush. So, the hand rankings are the inverse of the hand rankings in a regular high game.
How Deuce-Seven Triple Draw is dealt
Deuce to Seven Triple Draw is dealt as a six-player maximum game. The game uses a dealer button just like in Texas Hold’em. The player directly to the left of the dealer button posts a live small blind and the player two to the left of the dealer button posts a live big blind. Each player is dealt five cards and there is a round of betting. The first betting round starts with the player to the left of the big blind, just as in Texas Hold’em. Each player in turn has the option to call, raise, or fold.
After the first round of betting is complete, each player who has not folded has a chance to draw. Players are prompted in order to discard the cards they wish to replace in their hand. The first player to act is always the player closest to the left of the button. Players can discard from zero to five cards. If a player chooses to discard zero cards, he is opting to stand pat. After a player acts on his hand and decides how many cards to discard, the next player is prompted in turn to discard, and so on, until all remaining players in the pot have acted on the draw.
After each player has decided on their discards, the dealer begins replacing their cards in turn. For example, if the first player discards three cards, the second player discards two cards, and the third player discards one card, the dealer would deal the first player three cards, and then take that player’s discards into the muck. The dealer would then deal the next player two cards and take that player’s discards into the muck. The dealer would then deal the last player one card, and then take that player’s discards into the muck.
After the draw is complete, there is another round of betting. The players have an opportunity to draw again. After the second draw is complete, there is another round of betting. The players then have one more opportunity to discard. After this third and final draw, there is one more betting round.
What happens when there are not enough cards to complete the draw?
Sometimes there are not enough cards to complete a drawing round. When this happens, the muck has to be reshuffled and the draw is completed after the reshuffle. The cards that are included in the reshuffle are the mucked cards from all previous drawing rounds, and the mucked cards of any player who has gotten all of his replacement cards on the current drawing round.
Going back to our previous example, let’s say that Player One discards three cards, Player Two discards two cards and Player Three discards one card. The dealer then deals Player One three cards and Player Two one card. At this point, there are no more cards left in the deck. The mucked cards from any previous betting rounds are now shuffled with the discards from Player One only. Player Two’s discards are not included in the reshuffle, since all of his discards were not replaced. This means that it is impossible for a player to ever get his own discards back on a given round of betting.
Since we couldn’t fit his whole Super System II section on this spread we asked Daniel Negreanu to hook us up with a few basic tips on Deuce-Seven Triple Draw.
