What Poker Game Did They Play in The Sopranos?

King's talk. Two words from a dealer in The Sopranos and they tell you exactly what game the most famous poker table on TV was playing. Almost everybody watches these scenes and assumes it's Texas Hold'em because that's what poker is now. It isn't Hold'em and once you know the clues, you'll never watch these scenes the same way again. I host a home game every week, so I went back through every card game in the show, the executive game, Richie's back room game, and the one where a TV writer ends up $60,000 in debt, and I pulled every clue they left on the table. Start with the table itself. Pause on any hand in the executive game and look at the middle of the felt. There's no flop. There are no five shared cards that everybody plays. Instead, every player has his own row of cards in front of him, some face down, some face up, and everybody at the table can see the face up ones. In Hold'em, you get two cards nobody sees and the whole table shares the board. Here, the board is spread out in front of each player and that changes everything about how the game is played because you're not just reading the board, you're reading every single person's hand while they read yours. That's why everybody at this table stares at everybody else's cards. They're not being rude, that's the game. >> [music] >> The executive game, the biggest game Tony runs. Now, the line. Sunshine is dealing and before anybody bets, he says, "King's talk." In Hold'em, nobody would ever say that because in Hold'em, the order never changes. The button moves one seat, the blinds post, and the player after the big blind goes first. Nobody's cards decide who acts, but in this game, there's no button deciding who goes first. The best hand showing on the table acts first every round. Somebody's showing a pair of kings, so the kings talk. They're first to check or bet. Next card, if somebody else pairs aces, now the aces talk. The order changes every street and only one family of poker games works like that. You can hear it in the next few seconds, too. Check, check, the door's wide open and nobody's looking at a flop because there isn't one. Then he says something that sounds like trash talk, but it's actually a rule. Down and dirty last card. In this game, most of your cards come face up, but the very last one comes face down. So, nobody knows what you caught on the final card. That's down and dirty. And if you count how this game deals, two down, then one up, then three more up, then one last card down, you get seven cards. Keep that number. Then watch how the hand ends. Three deuces, three beautiful kings, and somebody turns over a flush to beat them both. A flush nobody saw coming because the card that made it was face down. Let me show you how a hand like that actually comes out because once you see it dealt, every clue clicks. Three players, everybody puts in a small ante, and everybody gets two cards face down and one face up. That's third street. The lowest card showing has to start the betting, so the deuce is forced to bet first even though he might not want to. And here's the mean part, he's got another deuce face down and nobody knows. Fourth street, one more card up for everybody. Now one player is showing a pair of kings, so the kings talk, and from here on he's first to act until somebody shows something better. Fifth street and sixth street, more cards up, and the third player is showing four diamonds. Everybody can see it, the kings can see it, so now the kings have a decision, bet into four diamonds or check and hope. Then seventh street comes down and dirty. One more card each face down and nobody can see it. The deuce is filled with a three of a kind. The kings catch their third king. And the diamonds, nobody knows if he made it until he turns it over. That's why a flush beats two sets of trips at the executive game, and that's why the whole table is staring at everybody's cards all night. And listen to what gets said the second that flush hits the table. You slow rolled me. That's the worst thing you can do at a card table without actually cheating. A slow roll is when you know you've got the winning hand and you take your sweet time showing it so the other guy gets to think he won first. Instead, it's even meaner because the winning card is the face down one. The kings are sitting there looking at three of a kind, the flush is in the guy's hand, and he lets the moment hang. At my game, a slow roll gets you roasted for the rest of the night, and I'd love to hear the house rule at yours. Does a slow roll get a warning, or do you make him buy the pizza? So we're pretty close to an answer, but here's what most people miss when they watch these scenes. Tony isn't running the executive game because he loves poker. The house never plays a hand, and it still goes home up every night, and you can see exactly how on screen. And for one player at this table, it cost a lot more than a night of chips. First, the cut. Did you cut the pot twice? Every pot the house reaches in and takes a slice before the winner gets paid. One pot, it's nothing. But a game that runs all night with hundreds of pots, the house takes a slice of every single one and the house never loses a hand. So the guys at the table are trading money back and forth and the house is the only one that's guaranteed to go home up. The second thing is the loans. In season 6, a TV writer named JT ends one night $57,000 in the hole, it gets rounded up to 60 and the terms are two points a week. That's $1,200 every week and none of it touches the 60,000. It's just interest, which brings us to Davey Scatino because Davey's story is the whole business model in one guy. Before he ever sits down at Tony's game, Davey already owes Richie Aprile $8,000 from Richie's smaller game and Richie has banned him until he pays. So what does Davey do? He talks his way into Tony's bigger game instead and Tony lends him five grand to play. And at first it works. Davey wins. The game runs all night, Tony goes to sleep and every time Davey's out of chips, somebody spots him a little more. By the morning, he's down $45,000. Then Richie walks in and sees the guy who owes him $8,000 sitting at a bigger table playing with borrowed money and that's the end of the game. In that world, you don't sit down at a bigger game while you still owe somebody from the last one and it doesn't end with the debt. A few episodes later, Tony and Richie bust out Davey's store. They use the store's credit to buy merchandise, sell it out the back and run it until the business goes bankrupt. The cards cost Davey a night, the house the house cost him his store. So back to the question because the last clue is the loudest one. In that season 6 game with JT, the dealer flips each player's card face up and calls it out loud. Little clubs for Joe Hollywood, a jack for the car wash king and then he says the one phrase that settles it. Seven Street. In this game, every round is named after how many cards you have. Third Street, Fourth Street, all the way to Seven Street, your seventh and last card down and dirty. No board, the best hand showing acts first, the last card comes down and dirty and the rounds are called streets up to Seven Street. The game they're playing in The Sopranos is seven-card stud, and it makes total sense. When these guys learned to play, backroom games on the East Coast were stud games. Hold'em was a Texas game. It didn't become everybody's game until the poker boom on TV in 2003, four years after The Sopranos premiered. So, guys like Tony, Silvio, and Paulie in North Jersey are playing the game their fathers played, seven-card stud. And look at it from the house's side, because it fits the business, too. Stud has an ante from everybody on every hand, and five rounds of betting instead of four, so the pots get big, and a bigger pot means a bigger cut. Plus, with half of everybody's cards face up, the whole table is reading each other all night. It's slow, it's personal, and it's built for a game that runs till the sun comes up. And if you host a game at home, there's one thing from these scenes to leave out, the cut. At a real home game, the house shouldn't take anything from the pot, not a slice, not a chip. In a lot of places, that's exactly the line between a friendly game with your friends and an illegal one. Everybody buys in, everybody cashes out, and the host plays for the same reason everybody else does. But the game itself, seven-card stud is a great game to bring back on a Friday night, because everybody's reading everybody's cards, and that's where the trash talk comes from. If you want to play it, I made a full walk-through of how to play seven-card stud, how the cards come out, who bets first every street, and a full hand played start to finish. It's right here. [music] And tell me in the comments, who was the worst player at that table, Davey or JT? >> [music]