Stripped Decks in Poker Variants
Stripped decks are used in certain poker variants. For example, the Australian game of Manila uses a piquet deck, and Mexican stud is played with the 8s, 9s, and 10s removed from the deck (and a joker added). This may require adjusting hand values: in both of these games, a flush ranks above a full house, because having fewer cards of each suit available makes flushes rarer.
A hand such as 6-7-J-Q-K plays as a straight in Mexican stud, skipping over the removed ranks. Some places may allow a hand such as 10-9-8-7-A to play as a straight (by analogy to a wheel) in the 32-card game, the A playing low and skipping over the removed ranks (although this is not the case in Manila). Finally, the relative frequency of straights versus three of a kind is also sensitive to the deck composition (and to the number of cards dealt), so some places may consider three of a kind to be superior to a straight, but the difference is small enough that this complication is not necessary for most games. Similarly, a full house tends to occur more often than a flush in a piquet deck, due to the increased frequency of each playing card rank, creating a change in poker combination ranking.
Five-card stud is also often played with a piquet deck. In lively home games it might work better to only strip three ranks (2s through 4s) with seven or eight players; with only two or three players 7s and 8s could be stripped as well, leaving the same 24-card deck used in euchre. In any of these cases, a flush should rank above a full house (in a 24-card deck it is actually rarer than four of a kind, but is rarely played that flushes are superior to four of a kind). Stripped deck five-card stud is a game particularly well-suited to cheating by collusion, because it is easy for partners to signal a single hole card and the relative value of knowing the location of a single card is higher than with a full deck.
Read more about this topic: Stripped Deck
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