Logic behind antes and the bring in...Help Please

[TylerT]

My friend and I were thinking of starting a home game that involved stud as one of the games. The only way I have ever played stud is with and ante and a bring in by the low card. He says that we should either play with an ante, or with a bring in. Not both. He thinks that if we have an ante, then the high card should be first to act on third street. If no ante, the low card brings it in as usual. Will someone help me with, or show me where I can find, an explanation as to why having both an ante and a bring in by the low card is/isn't the optimal method of running a 7-Stud game. Thanks for you time and help.

-TylerT

[chucky]

Some low limit stud High games in casinos play without antes, but the standard is to have have both antes and bring-in by lowest door card. These two parts create action. Without antes, drawing hands have reduced reason to play because pot odds on 4th and 5th will be horrible. There is great freedom in setting the ratio of bring-in and antes to big bet. Maybe other posters can give you their feelings about appropriate ratios.

[Andy B]

This deserves a more thorough answer than I'm prepared to give after a hard night of drinking and playing bizarre French card games I can't pronounce using this comical 78-card deck. For now I'll point out that both the ante and the bring-in are intended to stimulate action. Very small casino games may have a bring-in but no ante. Small-stakes players often don't need to be coerced into gambling. For most games, they have both the ante and bring-in so that people won't just sit on their hands waiting for the nuts. Standard casino games evolved over time to become the games that they are today, and it's not an accident that bigger games have bigger antes.

For a home game, I actually think that having an ante and no bring-in is OK. Having the bring-in only is just begging for ridiculously tight play, which will cause people to say that stud is boring.

[RustyBrooks]

In home games I've sometimes seen it where one guy pays all the players antes, and this rotates. Obviously this is no different than each person paying the ante each time except that
* it makes the game move faster ("ok, who didn't ante" "well, I did, I think bob didn't ante" and so forth)
* for some odd reason players tend to think of this like a blind or a bringin, and call more liberally when it's their turn. This is ridiculous, of course, because the difference between this and a blind or bringin is that it doesn't reduce the amount that you have to call to see the bet. Numerically it's no different than collecting the antes from each player. In my mind it's simplest if the ante donator is the dealer.
* It keeps the chips simpler. Well, it can... if you have a strange # of players it makes it worse. If you're playing 1/2 with 8 players you could just declare the ante to be 1/8 of a dollar and have the ante poster put in $1. This way you only need $1 chips and not $1 chips plus like 10c chips.

[T. Chance]

I guess without antes people would tend to fold to the bring in, because, there's not enough in the pot to fight, and without bring in people could all get to see fouth street for free.
So having both brings balance to the game.


[ QUOTE ]
This deserves a more thorough answer than I'm prepared to give after a hard night of drinking and playing bizarre French card games I can't pronounce using this comical 78-card deck.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think the game you're referring to is tarot.

[Andy B]

Yeah, French Tarot. I guess I can pronounce that. I think of tarot as what my ex does with Dee on Friday nights. I have played other games with this same crowd that I don't know the names of involving things like stripped decks, counterclockwise play, and the rank of the cards changing based on the trump suit (similar to euchre, whose rules I don't remember either). No one ever seems to be able to explain the scoring adequately. The beer is always great, though.

[Andy B]

The ante was introduced some time in the 19th century to prevent people from just sitting on their hands waiting for monsters. As poker evolved, other means of stimulating action were introduced. In casino poker, it is usually the player with the biggest disadvantage who has to start the action. In flop games and many modern draw games, it is the players with the worst position who have to start the action by posting blind bets. In stud games, the player with the worst card showing starts the action. You don't have fixed position in stud, so this works better than using blinds.

Hold'em used to be played with a single blind, and they'd sometimes have an ante as well in larger games. I believe that if you watch old WSOP videos, you'll see that they had a small ante in addition to the single blind on the very first level. When they went to the modern double-blind structure, it made for much better action--so much better that limit hold'em became the dominant form of casino poker in relatively short order. If you play $20/40 with a single $10 blind, there just isn't enough money out there for people to fight over. With $10 and $20 blinds, creating an initial pot of $30, there's enough to fight over that people will gamble.

Now take $20/40 stud. With a $3 ante and $5 bring-in, the initial pot is $29, about the same as in LHE. The low card is in for $5, a small amount relative to the stakes, but not entirely trivial. Having a smallish bring-in is good for action in two ways—it encourages limping, and it encourages raising. For $5, folks will limp in with a lot of hands. With a completion to $20, you raise by enough that you might get people to fold, or maybe you build a pot.

Incidentally, I think that this is a fundamental flaw with limit hold’em. Occasionally in stud, someone will limp in and then fold to a raise. Certainly, this happens in big-bet games all the time. You almost never see anyone do that in limit hold’em, because it’s usually moderately idiotic to fold for one more bet before the flop.

Anyway, I think the ante/bring-in thing is best because the initial pot size is a good size, and the initial bet is a good size. Casinos have come up with something that works, and they’ve tweaked the structure over the course of decades to do so. If your friend is insistent that you can have only one or the other (why?), then definitely go with antes. Having just the bring-in makes for way too small of an initial pot.

[AlanBostick]

What it comes down to is what kind of home game is this going to be?

I grew up with the structure of nickel-dime-quarter spread-limit stud where the dealer antes a quarter for the table and the high card has first action (check or bet) on third street. These games were fun games, lots of loose play, drinking and conversation, the gang getting together for a good time.

If that's the sort of game you and your friend are putting together, then I would see a strong argument for going with what you and your buddies are used to.

If on the other hand your game is intended to be "serious" poker, then go with a serious poker structure: something like a nickel ante for each player, low card brings it in for a dime, and betting limits of $.25 on third and fourth street and $0.50 on the later streets. (Scale these to the size of the stakes you want to play.)

Both the "serious" game and the "game for buddies" are legitimate games, and you can get a lot out of either of them. Just be clear in your own mind what sort of game you are hosting.