Today’s job is to get our heads around what hand rankings and rules have changed and why these changes were necessary to make 6+ Hold’em the harmoniously enjoyable game that it has become. We shall get into the strategic effects of this shift in a future article.

Regular Holdem players must adapt quickly in 6+ Hold’em, migrating from a world where good hands are relatively rare, to one where they come along much more frequently. I think it captures the instinctive reaction of most players. ‘Wait a second…it’s almost impossible not to make a straight!’ When I first saw this game, I recall my first thought being: As you can imagine, this leads to a lot less discoordination and makes it far easier to make a strong hand. There is no card in the deck below a six. They were consistent contributors to dry boring flops, blank turns, and no one ever making a hand. 6+ Hold’em (known conventionally as ‘Short Deck’) has been taking the poker world by storm and giving jaded long-term players a fresh breath of life as they gamble it up in this wild format of the game played with a 36-card deck. Let’s face it – fives, fours, threes, and twos got in the way a little bit in regular Holdem.

Everyone posts an ante and only the button posts a blind – known as the ‘button blind’Īvailable in cash games, exclusively at PokerStars, 6+ Hold’em is your chance to play an action-packed variant loved by high-stakes players around the world.

All cards lower than a six are removed from the deck.

6+ Hold’em is a popular ‘short deck’ poker format that plays much like Texas Hold’em, but with a few exciting differences:

Starting hand ranks for short deck