Home/5-Card Draw/Guide
Five-card draw against other players — not a fixed pay table — so there's no single provably-optimal line the way there is for Mississippi Stud. This is a classic ABC guide: solid, low-variance, generally-correct heuristics for which hands to play, how many cards to draw, and how to bet them. Good fundamentals against the table's bots, and against real people too.
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Standard poker hand ranking, highest to lowest. Every hand at this table is exactly five cards — there are no community cards and no wild cards.
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You get five cards and one shot to trade some of them in. Before the draw, judge your hand by what it already is, plus what it could become. Take the first tier below that fits.
You act first, with everyone still to act behind you and no read on the table. Tighten up — stick to Strong or better, and only the best of the Speculative hands (a good 4-flush, not a gutshot-adjacent pair of 3s).
You've seen everyone else act before you. Widen out — Playable and Speculative hands go up in value, since you know how many opponents you're drawing against and roughly how strong the field is.
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You get to trade in up to five cards, once, for new ones from the deck. How many you take is itself information to the table — more on that in the next tab — so match the discard to what you're actually holding.
Keep all five. Standing pat also disguises the hand — opponents can't tell if you're sitting on the nuts or bluffing with nothing.
With two pair, discard the odd card and draw one to try for a full house. With four to a flush or straight, one new card completes it roughly one time in five — a real draw, worth chasing for a reasonable price.
Keep the trips, discard the other two. You'll make a full house or quads roughly one time in ten — the rest of the time your trips are still a solid hand on their own.
Keep the pair, discard the rest. About a third of the time you'll improve to two pair or better; the rest of the time you're left showing down a single pair, which is still occasionally good enough.
Keep your two highest cards and draw three. This is a long shot at best — it's rarely correct to have called with nothing in the first place, but if you did, this gives you the best remaining chance.
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Draw poker gives away more information than most poker variants, because the number of cards someone takes is itself a tell. Use that both ways: read your opponents by it, and be aware of what your own draw is telling them.
Stands pat. Either a monster (straight or better) or a total bluff — rarely anything in between. Respect a pat hand from a player who's been playing straightforward; be more suspicious of one from a habitual bluffer.
Draws one. Usually two pair going for the full house, or a made hand looking to improve a kicker — sometimes a one-card flush or straight draw. Generally a real hand already, not a bluff in progress.
Draws two. Almost always three of a kind. Treat it like a real, well-defined hand.
Draws three. A single pair, most of the time — sometimes nothing at all if they were already committed to the pot. The weakest, most common draw at the table.
Bet roughly half to a full pot-size for value with a made hand post-draw — small enough that a decent hand still calls, big enough to charge a full price for a draw-out. Against a pat opponent or heavy pre-draw action, slow down with anything less than a strong two pair.
Standing pat with a weak hand is the classic 5-card draw bluff — it represents the best possible range, since a real straight-or-better stands pat too. It works best against opponents who fold too often to pat hands, and it works worst against calling stations who don't respect anything. Use it sparingly: once the table catches on, it stops working, and you're just giving away chips.
Sit down at the 6-max table and play these hands against the house bots.