Seven-Card Stud

This is how this poker game functions.

Seven-Card Stud is the poker game that most people are familiar with and that most people usually play at home.

The first seat to the left of the casino dealer is numbered seat one. The casino dealer always starts to deal with seat one and continues clockwise. All action follows clockwise too.

Each player gets a total of seven cards. Her first two cards are face down (hole cards), and her third card, also called the "Door Card," is face up. After receiving these three cards the action starts. The player with the lowest Door Card by suit, if two or more players have the same low card value, starts the action.

Note:
Ranking of suit for this purpose, from low to high:

Clubs,
Diamonds,
Hearts,
Spades.

Clubs (deuce) is the lowest suit (card) here. Aces are high.

On the following rounds of betting, the player with the highest hand acts first. With two players with the same high hand, then the first player with such hand left (clockwise) of the dealer is first to act.

After the first round of betting, and after the dealer burned a card, each player is dealt another card face up and another round of betting follows with the dealer burning another card.

This repeats until each player has four cards face up. Then the final and seventh card is dealt face down followed by a final(5th) round of betting. After this, the players show down their hands to decide a winner.

Some of these games use an ante posted by each player into the pot before any cards are dealt. Some use a bring-in bet, a forced bet.

Although you need only five cards to make a hand to win, a player must have all seven cards face up at showdown in order to have a valid hand and to be a valid winner.

A hand with more or fewer than seven cards at showdown will be declared a dead hand and the player loses any right to the pot.

A maximum of seven to eight players is usually the limit. This is done to avoid running out of cards.

If the dealer still runs out of cards in order to give each active player a full hand, she can handle it as follow:

She picks up all the unused cards, including burned cards, shuffles them, and now she should have enough cards to finish off the active players' hands as normal.

If she does not have enough cards, she deals a single card face up in the center of the table, a community card, and this community card serves as the seventh card for each active player's hand in order to complete the hands.

In situations like these the floor person is involved.

With a split pot, the player who has the highest card (tie by suit) out of the seven cards, gets the "Odd Chip".

Note:
The Fourth Street Rule. Here with an open pair on fourth street, any player can choose to bet the lower or upper limit.