Five-card stud—the first card face down, all others face up. No game has lost popularity so rapidly as this one. Thirty years ago two-thirds of the professional games were five-card stud; today not one-tenth of the games are. Five-card stud, the original and basic form of open poker, is a game for serious and conservative players. It was created to provide more rounds of betting (there can be only two in draw poker, before and after the draw; in stud poker there are four). But five-card stud does not fulfill the player's emotional desire for good hands (the average winning hand is no better than a pair of kings) and except for die-hards the game has no advantage over seven-card stud and several disadvantages—in seven-card stud the average hand seems better, there are five betting intervals instead of four, and the scope for skill is if anything even greater.

Seven-card stud—the first two cards down, the next four up, the last card down, with each player selecting five of his seven cards to use as his poker hand in the showdown. This is the pet game of rich men, celebrities, socialites (who usually play it high-low), and men's clubs where the players happen to like stud better than the usual blind opening draw game. The true professional dotes on seven-card stud, because in no other form of the game does observation or close figuring play so big a part. Nevertheless, it is not a widely played form of poker.

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