I mostly like to play NLHE, and haven’t played a lot of other styles of Poker. I’m familiar with draw, stud, and omaha, mostly enough to know that they exist, and that they’re not as interesting (draw, stud), or are outright bewildering and unplayable for me (omaha).
I’m a game designer, and I was thinking it’d be interesting to experiment with a poker-like game, where there are an additional two types of “made hands”: Even Straights and Odd Straights.
An Even Straight is a consecutive series of 5 even-valued cards of any suit: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10. Conversely, an Odd Straight is: Ace, 3, 5, 7, 9.
We could potentially further develop this idea to include the face cards in the range of even and odd straights, but I don’t like the idea of having to remember that Jacks and Kings are odd, and Queens are even.
I’d say that if we’re looking at the no-face variant of this hand, then the even straight is stronger than the odd straight, since 10 is higher than 9.
But if we wanted to play with odd/even applied to the face cards, we’d have the Odds series: Ace, 3, 5, 7, 9, J, K and the Evens series: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, Q. In this case, comparing two hands making an even vs. odd straight, which ever of the two has the higher valued top card would be the winning hand.
I’m curious to know if perhaps this hand is used in any actual poker-like games already.
I’d need to crunch some numbers to determine what the ranking of these types of hands should be. I’ll have to sit down and do that sometime soon. My hunch is that without face cards included in the ranges, that these would be rarer than regular straights, and possibly rarer than a straight flush. So I’m not sure where to rank them among the traditional poker hands yet.
There’d also be even and odd straight flushes, which would be even rarer, as rare as the Royal flush, but ranked just below it.
Apart from my curiosity about the odds, and whether anyone has played a game like this before, I’m curious to know if anyone finds the idea appealing. Would you be interested to try a game with these rules? Basically Hold-em (or take your pick if you prefer another poker game), with even/odd straights thrown into the mix of regular hands, ranked appropriately according to their probability weight? Why or why not?