[Andy B]

Great stud players make a little more than great hold'em players because they have more information available to them and are able to extract extra bets from their opponents on some occasions and save bets on others. The most important factor in determining how profitable a game is is the difference in skill between you and your opponents. A great stud player sitting in a game with competent opponents is probably not going to do as well as a good hold'em player sitting in a game full of incompetents. I am a better stud player than I am a hold'em player, but I do better at $15/30 hold'em than I do at $15/30 stud, because the $15/30 stud games around here tend to be populated by decent players (on those rare occasions where the game actually goes), while the $15/30 games tend to have more players who are less than mediocre. At the $3/6 and $6/12 levels, I do much better at stud than hold'em, because stud is my better game, and the small stud games tend to be populated by loose, passive players, many of whom appear to be terrified by me, no matter how badly I'm losing.

If your hand is live, it's usually correct to go all the way with a four-card straight or flush, even heads-up. If you're up against a big pair, you can even back into two smaller pair to win.

It used to be that your variance was higher in stud than in hold'em. This had mainly to do with the independence of the hands. In hold'em, the best hand holds up a lot more often than it does in stud. With the double-blind structure and more aggressive players in general, the pots can get very big before the flop in hold'em, so the variance in a middle-limit hold'em game is usually greater than in stud.

I've been known to call a full bet on third, another on fourth, and then fold on fifth. If a guy is doing it a lot, he's probably playing less than optimally, but I don't think that it's necessarily a sign of incompetence. Haven't you ever played a hold'em hand in a similar manner?

I play more hands in stud than I do in hold'em. I play a lot more hands in stud if I can get in for the bring-in.

If you're going to play this game, get 7CS4AP. The cover price is a big bet at $15/30.

Many would argue that play money poker is worse than useless, except perhaps for getting used to the mechanics of a site that you intend to play on for real money. I say this as a guy who has amassed a small fortune in play money on several sites.