Poker rules IV
Poker is such a popular gambling game and has so many variations that apart from official rules to determine hands and combinations, some unofficial rules have also become an important part of the game. Such unofficial rules are only followed by the house or casino where the game is being played and are mostly related to use of wildcards or bugs. Such hand rules, which are not accepted as part of standard gameplay, are also called special or freak hands. Since there are no set regulations to make the rules followed universally, they may vary from one house to another and need to be known by the gamblers before applying them in a game.
One such freak hand rule is the five of a kind where by using a wildcard or several wildcards or because multiple decks of cards are used in the game, a person may have five cards of same rank in his hand. If some one has four consecutive cards of the same suit, such as a diamond 10, jack, queen and king cards he is said to have a big bobtail hand and if instead of four, the number of cards is three, then it is the little bobtail hand. A Dutch straight or a kangaroo straight hand means cards are in a sequence but arranged alternately and so it refers to a hand that holds 4,6,8,10 and queen cards. When a player has no pairs but the cards consist of values 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10 then the special hand is called five and dime. Another freak hand is the skeet hand where the player is holding a 10 card, 5 card, 9 card and either a 3 or 4 card as his fourth card and a 6 or 7 or 8 card as his fifth card. When such arrangement of cards happens in a particular suit, the situation is where the player has a skeet flush hand.
