Once you feel like you have mastered a specific poker variant it can become quite tedious to play. Once complacency sets in boredom quickly follows and you can turn from a winning player into a losing one in no time at all.

A great way to keep your mind fresh and improve your overall poker skills is to learn a completely new variant. If you usually play online poker games like Hold’em or Omaha then a great game to look at would be Seven Card Stud.

Seven Card Stud is completely different from games like Hold’em and Omaha as there are no community cards on display. Instead you have to make your decisions based on the visible cards in your opponents’ hands. The first thing this will do is vastly improve your short-term memory because you will need to remember the cards folded in the previous betting rounds.

Your hand reading skills should also improve as you try to decipher the possible made hands and draws each of your opponents may have based on what you can see, their betting actions and the cards you know have already been folded. This in turn will aid your overall concentration and observation, two vital attributes for any winning poker player.

Once you have played enough hands you will almost certainly find your new skills come in handy when playing your usual game. Having the ability to play another form of poker is a great tool should you find yourself losing at your usual game. Instead of trying to chase your losses simply load up another game you know and give that a try instead.

Jeff Lisandro - The King of Stud Poker

Over the past ten years, stud had been in danger of becoming poker’s forgotten game. The rise in popularity of games such as Texas Hold’em and Pot-limit Omaha threatened to force one of poker’s oldest variants to take a backseat but one man could have reignited the seven-card stud flame and that is Jeff Lisandro.

Born in Australia but now residing in Salerno, Italy, Lisandro is a highly respected cash game specialist, making his living by grinding out hundreds of hands, day after day. He is also a well-known face on the tournament circuit and his first recognised cash was back in 1995 when he came 5th out of 113 entrants at the Festival of Poker in London for a £1,200 score.

Despite being proficient in most pokers disciplines, he certainly knows his Omaha poker strategy, Lisandro’s real strength is in seven-card stud variants, a point he proven time and time again. In fact the first of his 31 cashes at the World Series of Poker came in a $1,500 Seven-card stud event at the 1997 WSOP where he finished 12th from 160 players, winning $2,800 for his efforts.

Over the next few years, Lisandro started to build on his reputation as one of the best stud players in the world and in 2007 he won his first WSOP bracelet after besting a field of 213 in the $2,000 Seven-card stud event to get his hands on the coveted piece of poker jewellery and $118,426.

Just two years later and Lisandro would have a WSOP to remember – one that would put him in the record books and plant stud back on the poker playing map. On June 6th, 2009 Lisandro won the $1,500 seven-card stud event, then 12 days later he took down the $10,000 World Championship seven-card stud hi/low event for over $430,000.

Remarkably Lisandro’s winning streak continued and he won a $2,500 Razz event on June 22 to become only the fourth player in history to win three bracelets in one year and the first player to win a bracelet in each of the stud disciplines.

While the popularity of stud had fallen in recent times, Lisandro’s amazing performance at the 2009 World Series of Poker put the game back in the public eye and probably guaranteed it will be around for many years to come.