Many beginning stud players do not pay enough attention to the cards in other player’s hands. While a lot of learning the game involved being able to determine what hands to play and how to play them, you need to be able to keep track which cards are out and how this affects not only your hand, but everyone else’s hand as well. In order to do this, you need to find a way to be able to track the cards of the other players. Many players find difficulty in doing this because the task can seem daunting. Let’s go over a couple of things you need to do to improve you card memorization.

First, you need to know what cards are needed to improve your own hand. Let’s say you start with a J-10-9 unsuited. Suited cards right now are of little consequence. You know you need Q or an 8 to work towards your straight. You also need to consider the kings and sevens that are out. Then you need to consider the J’s, 10’s, and 9’s out. If you noticed, I mentioned what you will need to consider in the order of importance. Next look around. Next, I like to incorporate a point counting system to determine to stay in the hand to chase the straight. The card on either side of my 3 card straight is worth 1 point, and the secondary cards are ½ point. In our example the queens and eights are 1 point each and the kings and 7’s are half points. If you look around and come up with more than 2 points worth of cards, then you need to get out. If you don’t, then you need to commit to memory how many of your cards are out.

At this point card memorization becomes easy. Let’s say that players 2,4,7, and 8 fold and the other three stay in the hand. How many cards do you need to memorize at this point? The answer is four. Why do you need to memorize the other player’s cards? They are right there in front of you. I know this sounds simplistic, but many people don’t see the forest for the trees. As the hand progresses, at this point you need to pay attention to what the plays start to fold and try and commit those cards to memory.

Now there may be times to where committing a folding player’s cards to memory is next to irrelevant. For example, if you are against two opponents and one is holding K-10-J, what purpose does memorizing a folding player’s 4-6-2 serve? None. If the cards that are being folded are not relevant to the rest of the hand, then don’t worry about them. Granted, if the same example was related to Stud 8, then you would need to commit those cards to memory as the low cards take away outs from lows.

The point of card memorization is to start out memorizing all cards that are folded and then memorize those that are important to the hand. This will help you in the early going while you are mastering this skill.