From Texas Hold'em to Mixed Games: Where Should You Start?

Your habits transfer. Your hand charts and your bet-sizing instincts mostly do not. The table lists the five skills Hold'em players lean on most and how far each one carries.

Position: full in button games, partial in stud

Limit Hold'em, Omaha 8 and 2-7 Triple Draw have a button and blinds, so acting last means what it always did. In Triple Draw it means a little more: you see how many cards the player before you takes before you decide your own draw.

The stud games have no button: the exposed cards decide who acts first, and that can change every street.

Hand reading and pot odds: same habit, new inputs

The Hold'em question "what does this bet mean, given what they can see?" works in every game. What changes is the evidence. In stud you add every upcard, including the ones that were folded. In Triple Draw you add how many cards each player drew. In Omaha 8 and Stud 8 you ask the question twice, once for high and once for low.

Pot odds transfer fully, and the math gets easier because every bet is a known size. The one trap is the split pot: if you can only win the low half, you are drawing to half the pot and need about twice the winning chance. Split pots explained covers that.

Starting hands and betting patterns: partly

Being selective transfers. The list does not. The hands Hold'em taught you to open are a reasonable guide in Limit Hold'em and no guide at all in Razz or Triple Draw. Each game guide linked on this page has its own starting-hand section.

Reading betting patterns transfers only partly. Bet size, your main clue in no-limit, is fixed. The clues that replace it: which street a player raises on (a raise on a big-bet street means more than one on a small-bet street), whether they raise into a bet or only bet after being checked to, and in stud, whether their upcards improved before they bet.

Four things, and each has its own page on this site. Here is what each change is and why it matters to a Hold'em player.

Hand values in low and split games

In Razz and 2-7 Triple Draw the lowest hand wins. In Omaha 8 and Stud 8 the pot is split between the best high hand and the best qualifying low. So pairs and high cards stop being assets, and in 2-7 so do straights and flushes. In the split games, a hand that can only win one half is worth far less than it looks.

The low rankings also differ from each other. Razz is ace-to-five with no qualifier. Omaha 8 and Stud 8 are ace-to-five with an 8-or-better qualifier. 2-7 is deuce-to-seven, where the ace is high only and straights and flushes count against you. Low hand rankings puts the three side by side.

Fixed-limit betting instead of no-limit sizing

Every game on this path is fixed-limit. You can't size a bet to price out a draw, you can't move all in to end a hand, and a river bet is a small fraction of the pot. Your edge comes from extra bets when you are ahead and saved bets when you are behind, added up over many hands. Compared with no-limit, you will usually fold less often to a single bet, bluff less on early streets, and value bet thinner on the river.

How fixed-limit betting works covers the small bet, the big bet and the cap, and limit vs no-limit Hold'em compares the decisions street by street.

Stud information: upcards, dead cards, and a moving action order

For a Hold'em player learning stud, the biggest change is that there is no shared board. Every opponent shows you a different partial hand, so you read each one separately. Every folded upcard is a dead card that changes your outs, and you are expected to remember it. The action order moves too: the bring-in on third street, then the best exposed hand (the lowest in Razz) on every later street. Read reading exposed cards in stud before your first stud session.

Draw games: no board, information from draw counts

In 2-7 Triple Draw you never see any of an opponent's cards until showdown. Your information comes from two places: the betting, and how many cards each player takes at each of the three draws. A player who draws two, then one, then stands pat is telling you a story, and so is one who stands pat from the start. When to stand pat in 2-7 goes further.

Add one new idea per game. The order below is built so that each step changes as little as possible from the step before it, which is why it does not follow the letters of HORSE.

This is one path, not the only one. Some Hold'em players prefer Razz before Seven Card Stud because Razz has fewer hand categories to track. Others go straight to HORSE and let the rotation teach them. Both work if you keep the one-new-idea rule and play each game on its own when something is not clicking. HORSE vs THORSE explains how the rotations differ and which to choose.

Once you are a few sessions in, the mistakes Hold'em players make in HORSE is the companion to this page: it covers what goes wrong, where this page covers where to start.

The instinct: A-2-3-4-5 is a straight, and the ace is the best card in the deck. In 2-7 Triple Draw both parts are wrong. The ace counts only high, and A-2-3-4-5 is not a straight. It is an ace-high hand:

A♦ 5♣ 4♥ 3♠ 2♣

The lowest hand wins in 2-7, so an ace-high hand loses to any king-high or lower hand that isn't a straight or flush, including a rough nine like this one:

9♥ 8♠ 6♦ 4♣ 3♥

The usual fix is to throw the ace and draw one card to 5-4-3-2.

For the stud and Omaha instincts that change, such as big pairs in Razz, bare A-2 in Omaha 8 and dead cards in Stud, see the mistakes Hold'em players make in HORSE.

One session, one new game, one question. This plan assumes you are on step 2 or later of the order above; if you have never played fixed-limit at all, make the whole 20-minute block Limit Hold'em, then do steps 4 and 5 as written.

1. Set up (5 minutes). Open Play, pick an opponent and choose Single game and your new game under Format. Pick Beginner bots and heads-up for the first session; heads-up deals more hands in the time you have and gives you fewer upcards or draws to track. Move to 6-max in a later session, when you want dead-card practice.
2. Warm up with Limit Hold'em (10 minutes). Play a short single-game Limit Hold'em session. The only goal is to feel the small bet become the big bet on the turn and to notice how often one bet is not a reason to fold.
3. Play the new game with one focus question (20 minutes). Switch to your new game and ask the same question on every hand. Ignore everything else, including whether you win.
4. Quick review (3 minutes). Pick one hand where you were unsure and walk back through it with the question from step 3. Mix Poker has graded reviews of your matches, and how to review a poker hand has a worksheet if you prefer paper.
5. Write down one adjustment (2 minutes). One sentence, specific to the next session: "In Stud 8, before I call with a high pair, count the low door cards against me."

For step 3, pick one question about the biggest change your new game makes from Hold'em (the "What has to change?" section above names it) and ask nothing else. The seven-day practice plan has a focus question for every game.

Every opponent in Mix Poker is a computer opponent, so there is no table etiquette to worry about while you learn a structure. All six games are free to play against the Beginner band, each on its own or in the HORSE, TORSE or THORSE rotations, heads-up or 6-max. Those six games and three rotations are the whole lineup; formats such as 8-Game, Badugi and pot-limit Omaha are not in the app. Free players get a 1,000-chip daily bonus and one free Beginner seat a day after a bust, so a rough first session is not a problem. When you are ready to turn single sessions into a routine, the seven-day practice plan picks up where this page leaves off.