About

Who this is for, and how it is made

Seminar 27 is a set of course notes on poker's draw games and the newer mixed-game variants that players call carnival games. The name is a nod to deuce-to-seven.

1Who it is for

Hold'em players moving into mixed games, who need the rules and the rankings laid out without assumptions, and a way to drill the hands that trip everyone up.
Limit mixed-game regulars who play these games by rule of thumb or by aggression, and want something firmer to check their habits against.

Sound play in limit and no-limit draw games is much less well mapped than it is in hold'em. These notes do not claim to have mapped it. They try to set out what is actually known, and to be honest about where knowledge stops.

2The standard

Every rule traces to a source. We prefer rulebooks: the WSOP's live-action rules, the BARGE rulebook, Robert's Rules of Poker, and tour handbooks. The sources page lists each one and what it was used for.
Where rulebooks disagree, the page says so, in a red box, naming each side. We do not pick a winner.
A game is included only if written rules for it exist. A game known from one source is marked as such.
Nothing is copied. All text is written fresh. Cards and diagrams are drawn in the page, not taken from elsewhere.

3The three labels

Computed

A number we counted: outs, the chance a draw gets there, how often a hand is dealt. Every one comes from a small script kept with the site, which uses the same hand evaluator as the trainer. The evaluator is tested on known cases and has been run across all 2,598,960 five-card deals, where it reproduces the standard counts exactly.

Published

A statement of strategy that a named author has put in print in an established outlet, cited so you can read the original. It is reported as that author's view. Where our own counting bears on it, we say whether the numbers agree.

Solver baseline · simplified game

Output of our own solver. See below.

The site never presents opinion as fact, and never describes any strategy as optimal or solved.

4What the solver numbers are

The result of running CFR+, a standard self-play method, on a simplified heads-up version of three limit games: 2-7 triple draw, ace-to-five triple draw and badugi.
Close to the best play of that simplified game: a perfect opponent could win about 0.002 to 0.003 big bets per hand against them inside it.
Useful as a first sketch of how often to open, and of which made hands to keep or break against which betting lines.

5What they are not

Not a solution of the real game. The solver plays categories of hand, not individual hands, and ignores the fact that your cards cannot also be in your opponent's hand.
Not a six-handed solve. The six-handed opening shares are built from two-player solves.
Not available for every game. There are none for single draw, five-card draw, or any split-pot game.
Not finished. A report on how different styles of player lose money against the baseline is still being computed, and has a marked, empty place on the baselines page.

6What this site does not do

It carries no advertising, no affiliate links and no links to gambling sites.
It uses no trackers, no cookies, no outside fonts and no outside scripts. The only thing stored in your browser is your choice of light or dark theme.
It does not tell you to play. It is for education. If you do play, set a limit first, and stop when it stops being a game.

7Errors

Rules change and rulebooks get revised. Each source on the sources page carries the date it was read. If a rule here differs from the one posted in the room you are playing in, the room's rule is the rule.