Do you love to play poker online and trying new versions of this popular game? Are you wondering specifically how to play horse poker? Then you’ll find all the information you need to get started, right in this article.
Horse poker is actually a multi-mix of five different poker games, as you’re about to learn in the section below. It involves playing a separate round of each of the following games: Hold’em + Omaha + Razz + Seven card Stud and “Eight or better”.
While you should master these games separately to improve you winning chances, you’ll find some useful horse poker tips right here, that will allow taking your game to the next level. Read through the following sections and you’ll be ready to start enjoying horse poker online.
How to improve your winning edge at horse poker online
The single most important thing you have to do before you even consider playing horse poker online is to learn to play the five separate games, of course! When you start playing, you’ll keep getting impressed with the sizeable number of people who clearly aren’t familiar with all the games… which means that simply by learning to play all five games adequately, you’ll instantly position yourself strongly when you play horse poker.
It doesn’t even mean you have to be great at playing Hold’em, Omaha, Razz, Seven Card Stud and “Eight or Better”… it means you should be clear on all the rules and terminologies, and have a clear working understanding of all five games. Armed with this knowledge, you’ll manage to push your opponents around – especially in the later rounds that involve limit betting, and especially when you’re up against players who clearly lack experience with this betting style. There are plenty of soft spots to be found in limit betting games which are typically disregarded by players who are only used to no-limit games such as Texas Holdem; you should learn to exploit these subtleties.
While playing Horse poker online, you’ll be expected to actually sit through an entire orbit for each of the five games. Typically, most online casinos could even enforce mandatory betting for all games, to keep players engaged and active throughout the session. However, there’s no lower limit to the bets – and that’s something you can use to your advantage. To get the best possible results while playing horse poker online, you should aim to make the biggest bets in the games you’re most familiar with, while being most conservative in the games you’re still getting used to.
Even as you’re still amassing experience in some of the games in H.O.R.S.E. poker, you can improve your results by sticking to tried and true fundamentals of good poker. Universal poker principles apply across all five games – such as playing in position whenever possible, avoiding nonsensical bluffs, and adopting a conservatively tight approach where you spend as many hands as possible watching how the other players act, as opposed to playing every single hand.
If you want to learn how to play horse poker effectively, you have to develop a certain calculated aggressiveness. While you’re best served adopting a conservative stand at the poker table in general, it’s always a good idea to bare your figurative teeth every now and then to keep your opponents on their toes and pressure them into making bad decisions. To this effect, you should occasionally get aggressive and even bluff every now and then to get the message across.
Some useful horse poker tips to always keep in mind
When playing a round of horse poker, you’ll usually know the order in which the five games will rotate – this should be displayed prominently in the user’s interface, along with the name of the game currently being played.
In some cases (when playing casual games) it may be possible to change the games rotating order, or even to skip a game entirely – just as long as all involved players agree to this.
When you play horse poker in a tournament, the rules will tend to be stricter, and the sequence along which the games rotate will usually be specified in advance ( to allow for strategic considerations).
Remember – you’re not technically required to sit through all five games in horse poker… but if you fail doing so, there’s a good chance the other players will not be happy about it. You can usually find all these five different poker games separately available from your favored online casino, but when you choose to play horse, you should be prepared to play through all five games.