Is it all about Hold'Em or should sites give discounts to encourange other games

luckylucky

I remember when I was a lad, with a straw in my mouth and a deck of cards in me hand and when poker meant simply 52 card draw and there was me fleecing me local pals for pennies and of course being luckylucky I was lucky not to get my head kicked in, and lo and behold sometime in my teenage years I disovered 7-card stud and then there was some other weird ones like southern cross that I vaguely remember, but these days online it's about 90+%hold'em, what happened to the adventure and diveristy that is poker... so if any pokerrooms are out ther listening to luckulucky how about giving some incentives in form of lower rake to other games.

ArmaniJeanss

Theres a lot of negatives with other games from a player/pokerroom point of view.

In some of them a hand takes much longer (e.g, draw poker) which isnt good from a rake point of view.
And some games are technically more complicated (7card stud) than hold'em so they will never attract the continuous supply of new players who get drawn to hold'em by its (apparent) simplicity. And who, no matter how bad they are, will win often enough to think they are close to mastering the game.

Games like Stud are also much more difficult to multi-table, again bad for rake.

Hold'em also has the 'glamour', tv coverage, $5M tournaments etc.

So I think you may get your wish someday (its almost inevitable that a new craze will come along) but short and medium term Holdem will remain The Game.

DeVore

Its much more difficult for the monkeys to memorise starting-hands and stats and push or fold preflop.

I'm being silghtly facetious saying that but in part its a reason behind hold'em's rise. Its very accessible.
Then there is TV, Hold'em works for TV because Mr Trailertrash can follow it on the TV and grasp the basics. I'd like to see Jesse May and Simon Trumper explain the idea of a wrap with a set. Then when goes to his casino he only know how to play HE.

I would expect more people to move to Omaha in the near future (I recently have) as they become bored with Holdem.

DeV.

Imposter

I was kinda lucky that I live here and got introduced to Stud through a very soft game here. Now the stud game is dead and it's 90% limit HE with occasionally a NL table and on the very very odd occasion a PL Omaha game. The NL/PL tournaments are a big draw but most don't/won't play NL afterwards, they'll play limit or go home!

Online Stud is crap. The game is very tight, at 5/10 whereas with limit holdem at 5/10 or say 1/2 NL HE there's a lot more money to be won, so the Stud games loses potential players because of that. As already said it's harder to multitable as well. It's a far better game though

luckylucky

Can you tell I was absolutely sozzled when I made that post
Anyway I completely agree with the reasons why you guys give for Hold'Ems dominance, and Armani's reasons for pokersites not overly pushing other games sound spot on too.