What is short deck poker?

Short deck hold'em, also called six-plus hold'em, is Texas hold'em played with a 36-card deck. Every deuce, three, four and five is removed, leaving sixes through aces. The ace still plays low, so the smallest straight is A-6-7-8-9.

Does a flush beat a full house in short deck?

Yes, in the standard rule set. Each suit holds only nine cards instead of thirteen, which makes flushes rarer than full houses, so the ranking is swapped to match the maths. Some rooms also promote three of a kind above a straight, so check the house rules before you sit.

How often do you flop a set in short deck?

About 17% of the time with a pocket pair, against roughly 12% in a full deck. There are fewer unseen cards, so your two remaining set outs represent a bigger share of the deck. Set mining is cheaper to justify, but a flopped set is far less safe than it would be with 52 cards.

What are the best starting hands in short deck?

Big pairs and ace-king still lead, but connected cards like JT and 98 gain a lot because straights come in constantly. Suitedness is worth less than you are used to, since a flopped flush draw has five outs rather than nine. Low pairs drop because their sets are so often outdrawn.

Is short deck higher variance than regular hold'em?

Considerably. Preflop equities run much closer together, every player antes, and stack-to-pot ratios are low, so more money goes in with thin edges. Expect a larger standard deviation per hundred hands and size your bankroll above your usual hold'em requirement.

Short Deck Hold'em Strategy: New Odds, New Rules

Short deck hold'em, or six-plus hold'em, is Texas hold'em played with a 36-card deck: every deuce, three, four and five is out. That one change reorders the hand rankings so a flush beats a full house, and it rewrites every odds figure you have memorised. You flop a set about 17% of the time instead of 12%, and an open-ended straight draw arrives nearly half the time by the river.

What removing sixteen cards actually does

Thirty-six cards remain, and each suit is down to nine of them: six through ace. The ace still plays at both ends, so the wheel is A-6-7-8-9.

Three consequences follow, and the rest of the game sits downstream of them.

Hands run closer together. With the small cards gone, everybody's holding improves. Two random cards are stronger than they were, so the gaps between ranges narrow and far more spots become near coin flips.

Straights get easy, flushes get hard. Connected cards now have almost no dead space around them, while a suit that once had thirteen cards has nine. Your flopped flush draw has five outs, not nine.

The pot is already big. Most games use an ante from every player plus a double ante from the button, so there is real money to contest on every deal and stack-to-pot ratios stay low.

The rankings change, and so does what they are worth

Two lines of the ladder move, and one moves only in some rooms.

Hand	Full 52-card deck	Short deck
Flush	Loses to a full house	Beats a full house
Full house	Beats a flush	Loses to a flush
Straight	Beats three of a kind	Usually still beats it
Three of a kind	Loses to a straight	Promoted above a straight in some rooms

The reasoning is pure frequency. Flushes became rarer than full houses when four cards left each suit, so the ranking was swapped to follow the maths. Straights became so common that a few rooms lift trips above them too. That rule is not universal, so read the table card before your first hand.

If the standard order is not yet automatic, the poker hand rankings chart is the baseline you are editing here, and only these lines move.

The odds you already know are wrong

Every draw number shifts, and not all of them in the same direction.

From the flop	Full deck	Short deck
Flop a set holding a pocket pair	about 12%	about 17%
Open-ended straight draw by the river	about 32%	about 46%
Flush draw by the river	about 35%	about 30%
Gutshot by the river	about 17%	about 24%

An open-ender is now a favourite to miss by only a whisker, while the flush draw you used to love has quietly become the weaker holding. The rule of 2 and 4 no longer applies, because 31 unseen cards after the flop is a much smaller pool than 47.

Rule of 3 and 6: multiply your outs by three for one card to come, by six for two.

That heuristic only helps if you are counting your outs correctly in the first place, and short deck punishes sloppy counting hardest on flush draws.

Which starting hands gain, and which quietly lose

Connectors and one-gappers gain the most. JT, 98 and T8 make straights constantly, and they make them on boards where an opponent holds top pair and cannot fold.

Suitedness matters less. Two suited cards are still better than two offsuit ones, but the premium shrinks with only nine cards in the suit. Stop treating suited junk as playable.

Aces gain. The ace is the top of every flush and both ends of the straight ladder, so any ace has real value.

Big pairs lose ground. AA and KK are still the best hands dealt, but they win less often and get outdrawn more. AK is no longer the clear underdog to QQ that it is with 52 cards; the race is close to even.

Small pairs drop. They flop sets more often, then lose those sets to straights, flushes and bigger sets.

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Postflop: draws are strong, made hands are fragile

One pair is close to worthless. Top pair with a good kicker is a bluff-catcher, not a value hand, and stacking off with an overpair on a connected board is the fastest way to lose your buy-in.

Two pair is the classic trap. It looks strong, it beats nothing that pays you, and it is dominated by the straights that arrive on the next card.

Sets do the heavy lifting, but treat them as strong rather than untouchable. Set over set is far more likely with 36 cards, and any four-card run on the board threatens you.

Draws swing the other way. An open-ender with 46% equity can raise, jam and fold out better hands while still holding a near coin flip when called. Semi-bluff far more aggressively than you would with a full deck.

Stack sizes, aggression and table flow

Antes from every seat mean the pot is worth taking before anyone has seen a card. Opens are frequent, three-bets are frequent, and a hundred-big-blind stack behaves more like sixty because the pot starts so large.

Most games run six or seven handed, so the 6-max table dynamics you already know apply — wider ranges, more confrontations, position doing more work — only compressed further by the ante structure.

Two adjustments carry most of the weight. Open a little wider than your full-deck ranges, and put in the last raise more often when you hold equity rather than a made hand. Passive calling is the losing style here, because no hand is safe enough to protect by calling.

Variance and bankroll

Closer equities plus low stack-to-pot ratios equals swings. You will get money in as a 55/45 favourite far more often than as an 80/20 one, and a run of lost flips looks identical to a leak while it is happening.

Before you move a bankroll across, model variance in short deck games using a lower win rate and a higher standard deviation than your usual hold'em figures. Most players need more buy-ins than they expect, and the ones who go broke usually did the arithmetic on their full-deck numbers.

A starter game plan

Learn the two ranking swaps cold before you play a hand for money.
Replace the rule of 2 and 4 with three and six, and recount every flush draw as five outs.
Downgrade one pair and two pair, and stop paying off with overpairs on connected boards.
Upgrade draws — raise with them, jam with them, and stop treating them as calling hands.
Fold the low end of straights to serious aggression, however pretty the board looks.

Short deck rewards players who rebuild their intuitions rather than importing them. The maths is not harder, it is simply different, and the opponents who never bothered to redo it are the reason the games play so well.