Serious question. Some people seem to really love this game, but the allure is lost on me. What’s fun about playing a poker game where everyone has an amazing hand all the time?
I think it is easier for beginners, just my thought.
WBH
Easy to learn poker, you see the value of the cards better
Replace the ‘all in’ a bit
Much easy to play, aka less attention need
More action
Great for casual players
Albeit, have the own tactic or/and stile too
It’s more fun than Hold’em!
I don’t really play on those tables but when I do, I select a low buy-in one to be a little bit more looser.
You also improve your skills on reading the board (Community cards) and identify which hand is the nuts (Strongest available)
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There is still a great deal of strategy involved (knowing which hands to play preflop and which hands to bet on the board). Just because all of the hands would be good in regular holdem does not make them good in royal. For example, pocket Js are a terrible starting hand and a straight is a terrible hand.
The other tricky part about royal is that because the deck is so much smaller there is even more variance than regular holdem. For example, AA is still the best starting hand in royal, but the probability of beating a random hand with it is much lower. This can get frustrating when players who dont know any better get super aggressive because you can make the right call against them and still lose a high percentage of the time.
To sum up, royal is more complex and challenging than meets the eye. It’s a fun game to learn.
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I’ve avoided royal poker, having learned through playing hold’em. But I can’t help but wonder if you learn poker as a beginner playing royal, aren’t you going to have a really hard time when you start playing something like hold’em or Omaha and have to deal with the real value of the hands?
Seems to me it’s very similar to another game - Pai Gao (sp?) maybe??
That’s a good question. I learned on 5 card draw and felt like I never got the base I needed until Hold’em became popular. I only now realize how embarassing this sounds, as Wikipedia says 5 card draw is considered “the simplest variant of poker.” I was young and dumb, what can I say?
The game itself is just different than texas hold em. It only takes like 5 minutes playing to realize now that these “amazing” hands are not so. Yes, it takes some getting used to. Two pair for example is the worst possible hand. So a royal player knows this and will fold it. A straight can win sometimes but is nothing special. Most of the time the strategy goes into the full houses, and you really must know the order of them. (For example “aces full of tens” will beat “kings full of queens” etc). Full houses get beat all the time at royal the strategy goes into figuring out if you have the best one, can be beat or not. It’s a great game as far as you can smell a bluffer from a mile away, as with all different cards on the board there’s really nothing to bet on yet. Give it a chance for a few minutes, play and don’t be too aggressive and you’ll see how interesting it can be. Finally, any hand can win any time. I’ve had AA five times today, and even though this IS the best odds starting hand it can lose any time. A 10 J may get lucky when the other 3 10s hit the board. Basically it’s not an “all in” game but rather one where you need to actually use your brain and make critical decisions that are constantly changing. If this sounds good to you and not intimidating you should give it a try.___
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Royal poker is literally the nuts. I like it because it offers a great opportunity to regularly need to calculate pot odds. If you have two pair and can identify you are against a straight, you should be able to calculate whether you should be calling or not. Who does not enjoy laying down a flopped straight? or queens full and finding out you were right? or calling the min bet on the turn to close the betting with two outs to the stone cold nuts and connecting? Like any poker game, you have to observe hand selection and Bankroll Management, but Royal Poker is a good place to get a relatively fast game and a regular supply of involvement pots.
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(deletes “the”) … Royal poker is litterally nuts !!!
Its the closest thing there is to Bingo. You can’t generally rely on anything holding up, unless its like 4kind on the flop.The nuances needed to be a great Royal player are subtle, but if you can get past that… there are way more donks trying to play royal, than hold’em or omaha…
If you love Hi/Lo Omaha, you’ll probably hate Royal. The variance in Royal is really low: good hands mostly win, bad ones mostly lose. Hands tend to be decided on the flop or even preflop.
Now that I’ve gotten used to it I find Royal to be a really high-skill game. You are forced to accurately assess your opponents’ play and hands, and to pick the correct bluffing and semi-bluffing frequency and opportunities. Tight-aggressive play is strongly rewarded, and shifting gears can have huge payoffs. The six-player tables necessitated by the format accentuate all of this.
I consistently see the same few players at the final table in RP Royal tournaments, and can determine with reasonable accuracy where regular players will finish. This is as close to chess as poker normally gets.
The biggest downside of Royal on RP is that there aren’t really any high-stakes tournaments: I’m not sure I’ve ever won 100,000 chips. (This is also part of the predictability: I’m sure most of the strongest players on the site avoid the game for this reason.) But it’s still fun to win a tournament. When I was trying to max out my RP achievement list, Royal was my go-to game for tournament wins, and I still play whenever there’s a reasonable opportunity.
The other big downside I’ve experienced a couple of times is sitting down in a (rare) ring game and forgetting I’m playing Royal for the first couple of hands. Let’s just say I’ve made some spectacular overbets in that situation. I’m dumb. You should come take all my chips.