Beginners Dealers Choice night - Looking for advice (6 Viewers)

[roughrabbit]

Looking for some advice on running a dealers choice night for the first time. Focus of the night will be on more traditional dealers' choice games rather than circus games.

Background:
I have been pushing for the game I cohost to include dealer's choice / circus games for the past 6 months with little success. We have integrated bomb pots and now double board holdem bomb pots but not much more than that. At our last meeting, I mentioned it again and one of the older members chimed in that playing a night of draw games would be fun. This finally started a discussion that ended in the group agreeing to play a night without holdem focused on dealers' choice games of yore. Our game is a small stakes holdem group, playing 0.25/.50 with an average buy-ins between $25 - $50. Buy ins are low but it's standard for players to be in multiple buy-ins. Group is generally risk adverse and sees slow bleeding and rebuying as fine (battle for another day)

Game selection:
I'm a youngin and only have exposure to hold'em and PLO live.
Based on the discussion these are the games that the group was interested in:
A-5 Single Draw
5-Card Stud
5-Card Draw
Badugi

Game setup:
I have the chips to spread any stake and myself + the other dealer are competent enough to deal each game, but most of the players (self included) have never played/or dealt a game with the following:
Limit
Bugs
Antes
Bring ins

Questions:
1. What are suitable stakes comparable to a 0.25/0.25 holdem game?
2. Are the games listed above suitable for an introductory dealer's choice game?
3. Any other games worth including and/or replacing current games?
4. Are antes required for stud games? Depending on stakes, not sure what a suitable ante,bring in, complete $ would be.
5. Does a player have to complete prior to a flop, or can all players call the bring in amount?
6. Are bugs worth including?
7. Better to have true dealers choice, with a full orbit, or just cycle through games ever orbit?
8. Any other considerations I am missing?

Thanks
to the community for the help!

 

[acezag]

• If you have 7 or more players, you're going to run out of cards on typical draw games
• IMO Stud is not a popular choice with people who haven't already played a lot of it
• Having a preset rotation will save you from having to overrule the people who want to call stupid / crazy games
• Here's some popular alternatives that are constantly called at PCF meetups -
  • Draw2maha
  • God's Game (double board 5 card Omaha)
  • Scarney
• Here's some games that help introduce key elements to newbies
  • California Low Ball (teaches low hands - makes Omaha hi/lo and BigO possible down the line)
  • Pineapple / Crazy Pineapple (good "safe" intro for NLHE players)
• .25 / .25 is perfectly good for pot limit game. .25/50 also keeps pots easy to calculate
• You need someone (and ideally a few) who are comfortable with the rules and ruling on the games in your rotation
• You need someone who is decently fast at calculating / splitting pot limits (or you need to practice a bunch)

 

[inca911]

Best is to get someone near you with experience to attend. Badugi should be among the last games played. it seems tough for people to grasp. Teach players to get close to pot rather than count everything perfectly. Minutae doesnt add fun to mixed games!

 

[suchj0sh]

To answer regarding equivalent stakes for limit games, I would think $1/$2 or $1.50/$3 if you want a 3/6 chip stake would be suitable.

I like A-5 or 2-7 played triple draw personally.

 

[Labrat]

My group seems to favor split pot circus games like Stud-8, Omaha-8, Double Board Omaha...etc.

May want to consider those, also.

 

[BleedingChips]

I had a great dealers choice night last month with some non-hold ‘em variations. I picked a few easy ones that followed a familiar and easy to follow pattern to ease people in. We played the non-hold ‘em variations as limit games to minimize any major damage to newbies. Cincinnati was a crowd favorite a there were some great disguised hands that hit.

 

[bigdonkey]

Questions:
1. What are suitable stakes comparable to a 0.25/0.25 holdem game?
2. Are the games listed above suitable for an introductory dealer's choice game?
3. Any other games worth including and/or replacing current games?
4. Are antes required for stud games? Depending on stakes, not sure what a suitable ante,bring in, complete $ would be.
5. Does a player have to complete prior to a flop, or can all players call the bring in amount?
6. Are bugs worth including?
7. Better to have true dealers choice, with a full orbit, or just cycle through games ever orbit?
8. Any other considerations I am missing?

Thanks
to the community for the help!

1. I'd say between .50/1 and 1/2 limits would be about right.
2. Triple Draw is more fun than Single Draw (especially Limit). My group prefers Badugi to TD, but I introduced them to draw and low-ball concepts with triple draw. I'd probably leave out Badugi to start. 5-Card Draw is not a fun game and no one calls it. 7-Card Stud is a much better option than 5-Card. There is too much info available in 5CS with little opportunity to bluff. 7CD will generate more action. Stud in general is not well received amongst my group (tho I love it). We played a 5 hour dealers choice session a couple weekends ago and not one Stud game was chosen. But I think it's worth introducing. The most popular picks are flop games by far.
3. 7-card stud, 7CS/8 and Razz are all worth trying. If you only want to stay away from Hold 'em games and not flop games in general, I'd introduce Omaha for sure. And then there are a lot of variants to expand on from there, later. Hold 'em variants like Pineapple (all forms) and Hollywood are popular with my group and juice up plain old HE a little bit.
4. Just have one person ante for the whole table each hand, equal to 1 small-bet. Bring-in equal to half a small-bet. A a completion is literally just completing the bring-in to the size of a full small bet. So if you are playing 1/2 - $1 table ante, $.50 bring-in and $1 complete.
5. There is no flop in stud. After the ante, each player receives their 1st 3 cards (2 down, 1 up) and the low card brings it in (or chooses to complete). Each player in turn after the bring-in can either fold, call the bring-in, or complete, or raise if there someone has completed. For the record, completing the bet does not count as a raise. So a capped round of betting on 3rd street would be bring-in, complete, raise, raise, raise, whereas on other streets it would be bet, raise, raise, raise.
6. I would not include bugs.
7. I'd do at least one cycle through all of the games to introduce them. From there you can move to dealer's choice. No need to keep forcing a certain game if no one likes it. You'll quickly see which games are popular or not by what keeps getting called.
8. For tournaments I start out as dedicated dealer, and then players take over as the are eliminated. For dealer's choice I find it a bit much to try to keep up with dealing a new game every orbit so I have each player deal the entire orbit of the game they chose.