I view home games quite differently, however.  In my opinion, if you have a home game where players call "7-Card Stud Hi Lo declare, low card in the hole wild, with a common card on sixth, $10 protection, roll your own on the first three cards" or "5-Draw, hi lo declare, roll your own" -- I say, don’t change a thing.  Let me tell you why.

There is nothing sacrosanct about playing in a casino.  True, there’s a mystique about it.  They have the nicest chips, professional dealers, free drinks, and an atmosphere that makes the game more exciting.  And it’s also surely true that for someone who wants to play poker for a living, it provides a convenient place to find games -- with many rooms having dozens of games going 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

But there’s a cost for this convenience and ambiance.  It’s called the rake -- that house charge out of the pot or per hour that all players must inevitably pay for the privilege of playing in the casino.  They are a highly profitable operation, after all.  That profit must come from somewhere.  The rake is how they make their money.  It’s roughly $10 an hour for the low- and mid-stakes games that nearly all of us play.  Higher stakes have higher rake.  And that doesn’t count the tips to the folks who bring drinks and food,  nor the tips to the dealers.  Add another $3 or $4 an hour for that.

So I ask myself, if I can find a good home game, where the rake, if there’s one at all, is closer to $5-10 a night, why would I want to decrease my profit by $13 or so an hour?  Some might answer, Because the games that are played in a casino are better games for the skilled player.  In fact, I’ve heard people refer to the games in home poker as "luck" games that skilled players can’t beat.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

The truth is that the trickier and more involved the rules of a poker game, the more of an advantage there is for the skilled player.

This is true for two reasons.  First, the more decisions there are in a game, the more opportunities for a poor player to make an incorrect decision.  Each of those decisions adds to the good player's advantage.  Similarly, the more decisions there are in a game, the more "chances" the poor player thinks he has to get a winning hand.  This encourages him to stick around longer -- meaning more eventual profit for the skilled player who knows to fold early on when his hand has little chance of becoming the winning hand.

Consider the first game I mentioned: 7-card stud hi-lo et cetera.  There are many decisions that a player must make in this game.  First of all, it’s "roll your own."  This means that the player gets all his cards dealt down initially and must turn one of them face up to start the game.  Which card does he roll?  A bad player rolls one at random, or he rolls his favorite card, or he rolls the lowest card so he "hides" his better cards.  But the skillful player thinks fully about the implications of his roll.  He considers what his chances for improvement are based on the cards he's likely to receive.  He thinks about what his opponents will think based on the card he rolls.  He thinks about how he might use this image of what he is likely to have to his advantage on later streets.

Then he has to think about how having an extra card and at least one wild card is likely to inflate the value of the average winning hand.  His potential Flush, he knows, greatly loses value with a wild card and an extra card.  He must also think about the relative merits of playing hands with little or no potential for low.  He takes this into consideration when his opponents bet on each of the seven betting rounds.

The unskilled player buys "insurance" (meaning that the last card will be dealt up instead of down) if he has a medium or high pair in the hole and he doesn’t want them to lose their wild status by having a lower card dealt down as the final card.  That’s the only matter he considers when deciding whether to get his last card dealt up or down.  But the skillful player is also concerned with how this twist will be interpreted by his opponents.  If he wants his opponents to think he has a stronger hand than he actually does, then he may want to mislead his opponents by buying his card up to make them think that he has a pair of wild cards.

With a declare instead of a "cards speak" hi-lo game there is yet another opportunity for the skilled player to profit.  He will be better able to figure out what hands his opponents are likely to have.  He can determine his declare accordingly -- he can often get half the pot, even with a weak hand in both directions, just by declaring opposite his final opponent.  Similarly,  he can often win the entire pot by misleading his opponent into a wrong declare or by figuring out when a declaration in both directions is most profitable.

Why would an excellent player want to move people from games like this?  If anything, I’ve found it profitable to play more in home games and less in rake-infested casinos.  The odder and more confusing the home games,  the greater my advantage.  I’ll be able to figure a profitable strategy while my poor opponents will be mucking around as if the game were entirely a matter of luck.  That’s what we as skillful players want, no?

Here’s another thought.  The poker purists among us don’t think of any poker outside of a casino as real poker.  But where did these casino games originate?  Even the purists don’t want to play Five-Card Showdown, which is a game without a draw and without straights or flushes.  That’s the way poker was originally played.  Draw was an innovation -- probably considered a wild version of straight poker when it was first introduced.  Similarly, it was only the "kiddie" poker players who considered flushes and straights anything but freak hands.  7 Card Stud?  I read an early poker text that described it as a form of poker so wild that no one could figure out the odds on anything.  And they deemed it no more than a "luck fest," unworthy of serious consideration.  Holdem, Omaha, Pineapple, and 7-Card Stud Hi/Lo were all similarly viewed by the purists of the time as unworthy of serious play.  Yesterday’s crazy games are now the standard fare of the casinos.