Poker Rules - Guts

Guts is an interesting poker game that is played with three cards. Before the rules of the guts game can be explained, it is important to realize that when you are playing with three cards the ranking of poker hands is quite different. The hand rankings are in order of a straight flush, three of a kind, straight, flush, one pair and high card. These rankings reflect the fact that when dealing with just three cards, a straight is rarer to get than a flush and three of a kind is rarer than both of those.

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Now, there are two primary types of guts that you can play online. The first type of the game is called Monte Carlo Guts and it is arguably the more popular version of the two games.

The Monte Carlo Guts Poker starts off by each player in the game being dealt three cards. Players are given a few seconds to look at their hand and decide whether or not they are going to be staying in the hand. At the same time, players must declare their actions for staying in the hand or folding and therefore it is impossible for you to know what your opponents are doing ahead of time or have any information about their actions before you act yourself. Once the intentions have been declared, the folding players muck their cards and the non-folding players turn their hands over, with the highest three card poker hand then going on to take the pot.

However, there are no blinds or bets, so you might be curious at this point as to how exactly the pot gets built up in the first place. Well, in Monte Carlo Guts Poker, the players that lose end up putting up an equal number of chips in order to rebuild the pot back to the same amount it was before the hand was dealt. So if six players remain in the hand and the pot is $25, the five players that did not win the pot would have to put up $5 each in order to rebuild the pot to the amount it was at beforehand.

This is why the game is called guts; because it takes guts for you to play a hand knowing that you are going to have to pay your own chips in order to rebuild the pot after a loss. The bigger the pot, the more guts it takes to play your hand. However, there is another format of this game that requires even more guts than Monte Carlo Guts Poker and that format is known as Survivor Guts Poker.

In Survivor Guts Poker, once the winning player has scooped the pots, the losing players compare their hands to see who has the lowest hand. This is because only the person that has the lowest hand is required to commit chips to replenish the pot and in fact they do this by replenishing the whole pot without any help. In the previous example, the $25 would come from one stack rather than five and therefore the Survivor Guts Poker variant requires even more guts to play.