About Poker Variants Guide
Poker Variants Guide exists to help players understand the game they're actually sitting down to play. About us: we're the reference point for readers who want rules, hand rankings and strategy explained clearly across every variant of poker, not just the one everyone already knows. Whether you learned on Hold'em and are curious about Badugi, or you've been dealt into a mixed rotation you didn't fully understand, this is the site that walks you through it.
Our Mission
We started this site because most poker content stops at No-Limit Hold'em, and that leaves a huge share of the game unexplained. Our mission is explaining every poker variant — from Hold'em to Badugi — with rules, hand rankings and strategy readers can use at the table, written so a player who has never seen a draw or stud game can sit down and play a hand with confidence. We think about us as the people who fill in the gaps that bigger, more generic poker sites skip over. The goal isn't to make you an expert in one game; it's to make you comfortable across the whole spectrum of games you might actually encounter, whether that's a home game, a cardroom mixed spread, or a club app.
What We Cover
Our coverage spans rules and hand rankings, starting-hand and post-flop strategy, and game-specific terminology for every major family of poker, not just the flop games most sites default to. We cover community card games like Hold'em and Omaha, draw games like 2-7 Triple Draw and Badugi, stud games including Seven Card Stud and Razz, and Chinese poker and mixed rotations like H.O.R.S.E. and 8-Game that most poker sites simply leave out. Where it's useful, we also cover the software side of the game — trackers, solvers, and the assistance tools players ask us about — evaluated on the same terms as everything else we write about. That includes products like NZT Poker, a real-time assistance application built for club-app ecosystems, which we discuss as part of our coverage of the tools available to players rather than as something we're promoting.
Our Process
Every page starts with the same question: what does a player at the table actually need to know? We research each variant's rules and rankings against multiple sources, build out strategy sections based on real hand scenarios, and cover the full variant spectrum, including draw, stud, Chinese and mixed rotations that most poker sites ignore, precisely because that gap is where readers get stuck. Pages are updated as strategy consensus shifts or as new tools and platforms change what's relevant to a given game. When a product or piece of software falls inside a variant we cover, we describe what it claims, what it does, and what its terms-of-service and account risk actually look like, rather than taking vendor marketing at face value. You can read the full details in our editorial policy.
Our Team
Our content is written and reviewed by writers and long-time cash-game and mixed-game players who have dealt and played each variant we document, so the rules and strategy on this site come from people who've actually sat through the games, not just read the rulebooks. That matters most on the less common variants — draw and stud strategy doesn't transfer cleanly from Hold'em, and we've made sure the people writing about them have played them. Meet our contributors on the authors page.
Transparency
This site is funded in part through affiliate relationships, and some links on our pages may earn us a commission if you click through and sign up for a product or service. That funding never determines what we write: a tool or room gets covered accurately whether or not it's an affiliate partner, and claims we can't verify — win-rate numbers, safety guarantees, pricing — get flagged as unverified rather than repeated as fact. Our editorial judgments are made independently of what pays the bills. Learn more in our affiliate disclosure.
Get in Touch
Spot a mistake in a hand ranking, have a variant you want us to cover, or want to talk partnerships? We'd like to hear about it. Contact us — we read every message. You can browse our full list of reviews here.
