Ellis Pribyl plays the games most rooms only spread once a week. He came up in Midwest home games in the nineties, when a dealer's-choice night meant you had better know stud eight-or-better and badugi as well as hold'em, and he has spent the last two decades in live mixed rotations — stud and its split-pot cousins, the triple-draw games, the big-bet Omaha variants — in card rooms across the Midwest and Nevada.
His argument, made often and at length, is that hold'em taught a whole generation one shape of thinking and mixed games punish it. Stud rewards memory, because the information you need was face-up three streets ago and is gone now. Draw games reward reading betting patterns with no board to point at. Split-pot games reward knowing precisely what you are trying to win, which is not a question hold'em ever forces anyone to answer.
On this site Pribyl writes the variant coverage: Omaha and its high-low and short-deck relatives, the stud family, the draw family, and the odder formats that survive in a rotation. He writes for somebody sitting down to a game they have never played before, and his standing advice to that reader is to learn the showdown rules cold first, because in mixed games most money is lost by people who misread their own hand.
