I played it for the first time the other night around a kitchen table (for matchsticks, if you can believe that). During the deals a card gets burned off.
“Why do you do that?”
“I dunno, it’s the rules”.
I hate answers that amount to “because the roaster was too small”. Is there a better reason?
It’s done to thwart cheating. If the deck is marked, then whomever marked the deck will know what the top card is and it could influence his betting. If that card is burned, then he won’t know what the first card that will be dealt is. He’ll still know what the first card won’t be but that is less of an advantage.
But…
Cards aren’t burned in 7 card stud, or 5 card draw, or any of the other “traditional” poker games I was taught when I was short. What makes this game different?
7 people playing 7 card stud or draw poker, there may not be many cards left.
In Texas Hold’m, there are plenty of cards still left in the deck.
In my poker playing days, I pretty much only played Hold’em. I’m not sure why they don’t have burn cards in other games. A WAG would be because way more cards need to be dealt in stud games and if they burned they would have to have one fewer player at a table.
So explain blackjack.
Oooh, that sounds bitchy - not trying to be. I’m just not catching the logic.
edit - that’s directed towards notfrommensa’s response
There was a topic on this very board about burning cards, and people pointed out that, from a statistical point of view, there really is no advantage to burning cards.
Do you have a link to that?
The key to burning is that it’s done after the betting, and just before turning the next card over.
Even if the deck isn’t intentionally marked, there may be times when a player recognizes a card from a bit of damage or a stain or crease or some other wear mark. That player has a HUGE advantage on the flop or turn. To avoid this, you have the betting round, then you burn the top card and turn over the next one.
Even if this doesn’t happen very often, burning is fast, has no other effect on the game, and is just one more way to keep the game honest.
The reason you don’t burn cards in draw games is that the same advantage doesn’t really exist to the same degree. In a flop game, the next card affects everyone. In a draw game, it doesn’t. It’s also much less likely that the card will do someone any good - in a flop game, if any one of ten players recognizes the next card, the game has become unfair. In a draw game or a stud game, only the first person to be dealt really gains a huge advantage from seeing that card. Other people may gain a slight advantage from seeing that the card won’t be available to them, but it’s not nearly as big.
If it’s the thread I think you mean, people were saying it would have no outcome on the randomness of the game if you burned 1 card, 2, 3, or any arbitrary amount. Any unknown card has an equal chance to be any card.
The “advantage” to burning cards comes from the cheat-thwarting potential, rather than anything to do with the probabilities of the game itself.
He could have a significant advantage if he recognized a card that had been dealt to an opponent.
Frustrating cheating may be the reason cards are burned, but I suspect this has little practical value.
This is an independent issue. Burning cards reduces the probability of a certain type of cheating - you can’t say it’s worthless because it doesn’t prevent other types of cheating.
I don’t think of reading an opponent’s hole card as fundamentally different from reading a card that’s about to be flopped. And burning cards isn’t worthless - just not fully effective.
One thing has no effect on the other. If you burned cards, you can still read the other guy’s pocket card. If you don’t burn cards, you still read the guy’s pocket card. It eliminates one potential avenue of cheating. It’s illogical to say that because it does not eliminate all possible cheating then it’s worthless.
Of course it’s different. Knowing what your next card is going to be is vastly more valuable than knowing what your opponent’s next card is going to be. For one thing, you don’t know your opponent’s other cards, so you have no idea if it helped or hurt. Second, knowing that the card is no longer in the deck only improves your predictive capability by a couple of percentage points. But if you know that the next card is going to make you a gutshot straight draw that you would otherwise have thrown away, you profit immensely from the knowledge.
In a flop game there are also many cards that dramatically change the odds for you, because of the unique nature of a community flop game. For example, if I’m thinking of calling to draw to a straight, if the next card fills in a flush draw on the flop, I can fold the straight draw knowing that in a 10-handed game, that flush is probably made and I’d be drawing dead. This aspect of the advantage is completely missing in a stud or draw game.
Other aspects of the game rules also rely on burn cards having been burned. For example if the dealer makes a mistake, sometimes burn cards are involved in the remedy:
13.2 Should any other single hole card be exposed (that is, not the first or second dealt) then at the end of dealing the hole cards the dealer will use that exposed hole card as the burn card and deal a replacement from the top of the deck.
13.3 If, after dealing the hole cards, the dealer accidentally deals an extra card to the first player, that card will be used as the burn card. (from http://poker.gamble.co.uk/rules/poker-texas-holdem.asp)
Also cards are burned when dealing 7 card stud. Same principle as holdem. A card should be burned before each street is dealt. The limited number of cards in the deck for a full table of stud players has no bearing on this, with or without burn cards there is a potential for a 8 player 7-stud table to need 56 cards. This is handled by dealing the last cards of the deck as community cards if that many people stay in the hand. But they definitely do burn cards when dealing stud.
This practice is far less necessary today than it was in the days the rule was developed because it was developed to protect the players from the dealer. Before internet poker or even legal casino gambling with professional dealers, poker was played by passing the deck around the table and each player took a turn dealing the cards. This presented opportunity to cheat. No so much by marked cards, which is also a possibility, but more so a practice called Second Dealing The dealer has all kinds of possible ways they could get a peek at the top card of the deck, and a skillful card cheat can effortlessly deal the second card instead, reserving the top card to deal to himself, or someone else at the table that it would benefit (an accomplice). By forcing the dealer to burn the top card between each dealing round the possibility is lessened, but of course never completely eliminated. That’s why the pit boss at a casino watches the dealer as carefully as they do the players.
It’s true that it’s part of the rules but largely irrelevant. The rules could easily be changed to accomodate a lack of a burn card… and generally to be honest there’s no logical basis for those rules. They essentially placate idiot players who think that “proper” random cards have to be dealt. Essentially it prevents dealer abuse by some idiot saying “see, my card SHOULD have come, but since the dealer screwed up and dealt the wrong card, I got the next card in the deck instead…”
Blackjack is dealt from the shoe using multiple decks. You’d have to be awfully lucky to see your marked card show up in a place where it would do you any good.
True - which is pretty much why I didn’t say it.
There’s no argument that knowing what your next card will be is quite valuable.
My point is that reading a card pre-flop isn’t really a different kind of cheating from reading other unexposed cards, and that both make a game unfair. What would be your reaction to someone who said “Look, we don’t have to worry whether the deck we’re playing with is marked or not, because the dealer always burns a card before each flop.” ?