Check Out Microgaming's Cyberstud Poker for a Different Experience

Added: January 23, 2015

A lot of Microgaming-powered online casinos like Royal Vegas are popular in New Zealand. At these casino sites, you can play a game called Cyberstud Poker that, by name at least, isn't really found anywhere else. What a lot of people don't realize is that this form of casino poker is a fairly easy game to play in the vast majority of cases, and it's all about trying to figure out the value of your hand compared to what the dealer needs to qualify. In general, the dealer needs AK-high to qualify, and this is the main thing you need to know about playing this game.

Your main decision is to fold or raise, and you have to make this decision based on a combination of the value of your own hand and the value of the single card that the dealer has showing from his five-card hand. The main strategic idea that will guide the vast majority of your play is the following: Always raise if you have at least one pair, and always fold if you have worse than AK-high. This leaves the AK-high hands specifically which require a bit more thinking, but that tells you how to play the overwhelming majority of hands in Cyberstud Poker.

So the when you have AK-high, you have to take into consideration the dealer's up card. Notice that if you don't have AK-high, it doesn't really matter what the dealer is showing. If the dealer's card is a queen or lower and matches one of your cards, then you're going to raise because you hold a card in your hand that makes it harder for the dealer to make a pair. If the dealer is showing an ace or a king, then you're going to raise if you also have a queen or a jack. Other than these two cases, you're almost always going to fold AK-high.

There is one more exception to this rule in Cyberstud Poker, and it's really complicated compared to the gain you get from it. If you run into a situation where the dealer's up card doesn't match any of your own cards, and you also have a queen in your hand, then you can go ahead and raise if and only if the dealer's card isn't higher than more than one of the cards in your hand. That's the only other exception to folding AK-high in this game.