Rules for Glass City Draw Poker

In my last article I recounted the origins of Glass City Draw Poker. This article outlines the rules for playing Glass City Draw.

The dealer antes a dollar. Each player starts with 6 cards in his hand. After you inspect your starting hand for potential flush and straight draws, hi cards and pairs, you place one of your six cards face down in front of you. After every player has "put a card into play", all the face down cards are turned face up. Then there is a round of betting - the player with the highest card showing is first to act, followed by the player to his immediate left around the table. The bet is limited to $1 in the first and second betting rounds and moves to pot limit on all subsequent rounds. After the round of betting, the player with the highest card face up or "in play" may choose to trade his card for any other card in play or discard his card and draw a new one from the deck. If a player trades his card for yours, you place his card into your hand and remove it from the playing surface. The player with the highest card remaining face up, or "in play" then decides if he will trade his card for a card in play or discard and draw a new card. Once all players have received a new card, either from an opponent or drawn from the deck, the next round begins. At the beginning of each round, players examine their hands and put a card into play face down, then all the face down cards in play are exposed simultaneously and the player with the highest card begins the betting for the round. Then the player with highest card in play trades it for another card or discards and draws. Play continues in this fashion until the pot size reaches a predetermined number. As soon as the pot has grown to the predetermined size the game will be in its final round, at the end of which all players still active (those who haven't folded) reveal their best five card hand and the best hand takes the pot. The game changes a lot depending on were you cap the pot, but a good place to start with $1 in the initial pot and five players is $20.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the levels of complexity that exist in this game. Every single had is its own puzzle. There are so many decisions to be made in every stage of every round that we had to implement an egg timer to limit players to one minute per stage to keep the game moving. You have to be aware of what cards have been revealed, and or mucked, which remain in players' hands, and which are still in the deck. You are attempting to put the best strategy together for making your hand (sometimes having to think two or even three rounds ahead) while you attempt to determine what hands the other players are trying to build. You have to make a plethora of, extremely difficult, decisions when deciding what betting action to take, which card to place into play, whether to trade it or draw, etc, etc.

Once I introduced Glass City Draw to my Monday night game, the players rarely dealt any other game in dealers' choice. Besides being, in my opinion, the most skill-intense poker variation I've ever played, the game is actually a great deal of fun. Every hand plays out like its own poker session inside a session. If all the players are working on extremely strong hands the betting can slow to a halt while the players scurry to build a winning hand. With every round of action inside a hand, the bar is raised higher and higher, and an exceedingly more powerful hand is needed to call or make a bet. When you start with a strong hand you might try to push the action and cap the pot before the other players are able to catch up, or you might build the pot very slowly with small bets counting on your ability to out play your opponents. The strategic complexity of this game would be impossible to convey in written form, it really must be played to be appreciated.

When you first learn and begin playing GCD, it seems to be a variation of poker not unlike many others. Once you've gotten a grip on the strategic subtleties of the game, it begins to resemble traditional poker only slightly and starts to take a form more akin to chess or Go. Once you've honed your skill at GCD the only task that remains is to introduce it to poker players and begin making money with a consistency that would be difficult, if not impossible, to duplicate while playing any other form of poker. If NLH can be thought of as a brutal battle of melee style, "stack to stack combat", and seven card stud as an intricate, long range missile-based war of attrition, then GCD is a full-out military campaign from one hand to the next. The element of luck has not been removed from the game completely. There is still just enough luck involved to conceal the edge of skill enough to keep losing players complaining about bad luck and anteing up again. Let's just say though, it's been a very long time since I have driven away from my Monday night game wondering how I've lost four weeks in a row. Until next time, "Good Luck!"

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