Omaha Poker

Choosing Best with Choicepots

A Choicepot is a pot in the more limited sense of the term.

Every Poker player contributes to the pot, and one can enter after an original pass, and that is all that can be said about it with certainty.

In some clubs, Choicepots are never played; in some they are only played occasionally, and the dealer has only two or three options to choose from; in others, again, they are prominently featured.

But the more extravagant types of Choicepot occur in privately organized games.

Choicepots which are played occasionally, with a strictly limited range of options, include:

Highest hand wins, all four cards of a nominated rank being Freaks; i.e., the four nines might be nominated. This hardly differs at all from an ordinary Freakpot.

Highest hand wins, but five nominated cards are Freaks; say, all the Spade honors, or the 8 7 6 5 4 of Diamonds. This is essentially a Freakpot, with one extra Freak.

A Mis�re Pot, but with four or five Freaks nominated as above. And finally, a Jackpot, Freakpot, or Mis�re Pot, to be won twice by the same player before its destination is settled.

Obviously such pots may involve those participating in a very considerable outlay, for the pot may (theoretically) involve no fewer than fifteen deals, of which none is passed out, before the final winner emerges.

In such a case the odds offered by the pot to any participant, however large his holding, become so considerable that all normal rules of play go by the board.

Other Choicepots which need only be mentioned cursorily include:

Poker-pots, which are seldom played but actually afford a high test of skill. These are pots which resemble a Jackpot save that a player can open on anything.

Pots to be divided between two hands: the best hand and the worst. This type of pot is very popular in America, but not so much in Draw Poker as in Stud Poker.

American writers on the game have devoted much thought to the analysis of the High-Low form of Stud poker. Its intricacies are of only academic interest here.

Pots where each player is dealt, say, six cards instead of of five. If he discards, say, three cards he can only draw two; if he discards only one he is standing pat on the other five.

Obviously, the hands in competition with one another will tend to be better than is normally the case.

Pots in which an entire suit is nominated as Freaks. Such a Pot is a pure gamble; at least one player in a table of seven is fairly certain to finish with a Royal Straight Flush.

So almost everything depends on the luck of the initial deal.