Keeping it Live: Using Upcards in 7 Card Stud

7 Card Stud is not a hard game to play. It’s just not what most of us online players are used to. If you came up like I did, you survived on a steady diet of Holdem and Omaha. Both of these games are pretty similar, and the skillsets involved in winning at them overlap significantly. There are some skills in 7 Card Stud, however, that don’t come to bear in either Holdem or Omaha play.

One of these is the rote memorization of upcards. In Holdem, the cards you’re concerned about are either visible—in which case they directly apply to your hand—or hypothetical (e.g., assigning opponents a range of possible hands). In 7 Card Stud, however, there’s a 3rd dimension: your opponent’s upcards.

Knowing how to keep track of upcards will keep you afloat in 7 Card Stud and is an important Stud poker strategy. Indeed, the most significant difference between a pro and a schmoe is often their grasp of this concept. Learn how to identify, memorize, and apply upcards to your game, and you’ll be on the way to 7 Card Stud mastery.

What’s Live? What’s Dead?

When you’re dealt a hand in 7 Card Stud, you’re more often than not looking to draw in order to improve. Thus it’s critical to recognize which of your cards are live, and which are dead.

A live card is one that helps your hand, and is not visible in any of your opponent’s hands. It’s live because it’s still available to draw, as far as you know. A dead card is one that helps your hand, and is visible in an opponent’s hand.

Obviously, you want as many helping cards as possible to be live, and as few as possible to be dead. Thus you need to get really good at memorizing which cards appear/have appeared in your opponent’s hands.

Applying Live Card Analysis

Imagine you’re dealt (8s – 9s) Td on 3rd street. This is a great drawing hand, as there are a lot of combinations that turn it into a monster. You’ve got an open-ended straight draw and a possible (but longshot) draw to a flush. Hopefully, most of your cards are live. Let’s see what you’re up against:

You:  (8s – 9s) Td
Opp1: (xx – xx) Js
Opp2: (xx – xx) 7d
Opp3: (xx – xx) 7s
Opp4: (xx – xx) Jc
Opp5: (xx – xx) As

You should immediately notice that almost every one of your opponents has an upcard that would help your hand. 3 of your spades are shown up, thus they are dead. Further, 2 of your jacks and 2 of your 7s are up—they’re dead as well. While you’ve still got some outs, the odds of your drawing to either a straight or a flush have been significantly lowered; a lot of your cards are dead.

Think of it this way. If we ignored your opponent’s upcards, we’d have eleven spade outs, three 7 outs, and three jack outs (three, since one 7 and one jack are already counted in the spade outs). That’s a total of 17 outs, which gives you excellent odds of making your draw.

Factoring in your opponents’ upcards, we need to reduce our outs by the amount of dead cards shown. Two of your spades are dead (which are also two of your straight outs, so we’ll only count them once). Further, two of your straight outs are dead. That leaves 13 live cards that make your draw, compared to the original 17 we calculated by ignoring upcards.

While your hand is still relatively strong, and this is an extreme example, it’s useful in illustrating the importance your opponent’s upcards play in calculating your own hand strength. Knowing what other players hold and factoring those holdings into your draw calculations will help you play correct poker. And in turn, of course, playing correct poker wins you long-term money.

That Wasn’t So Hard…

It might not seem like such a hard thing to look at upcards, and then to figure out how many of your outs are live or dead. But remember—your opponent’s upcards don’t remain up forever. As soon as a player folds his hand, it’s bye-bye paint. While looking and calculating isn’t such a trick, memorizing surely is. And there’s no magical trick to memorizing upcards. You’ll just need to practice, practice, practice!