Celestial Poker / Sviten Special
Introduction
This Poker variant is a cross between
Five-card Draw and Omaha. Players are dealt five cards 🛡 each, and a there are five face
up shared cards on the table. After the first three shared cards (known 🛡 as the flop)
have been dealt, players can discard some of their hand cards and obtain replacements.
The pot is 🛡 split between the best five-card hand and the best Omaha hand. This mixture
of games guarantees action and is normally 🛡 played quite aggressively.
As reported by
Jonas Uebel, this game has become very popular in the Nordic countries under the name
🛡 Sviten Special, and is widely believed to have originated in 2004 in Anders Bengtsson's
legendary Sviten poker club in Stockholm, 🛡 as described for example on this festival
page. However I am told by Sebastién that an identical game was played 🛡 in French Canada
in the 1980's where it was known as Celestial Poker (or in French, Céleste). The
'festival page' 🛡 article also mentions that a similar game is played in the USA under
the rather clumsy name 'Drawmaha'. It may 🛡 well be that over the course of a quarter
century or more this same idea has arisen independently in several 🛡 widely separated
places.
Players, Cards and Stakes
A standard international 52-card deck is used. The
optimum number of players is 5 or 🛡 6. It is possible for up to 9 to play, but then you
often have to recycle cards discarded by 🛡 the earlier players to be drawn by
others.
Players agree the size of the small and big blinds, and the betting 🛡 limits.
Sviten Special is preferably, and in its original format, played as pot limit.
Deal and
Betting
As in any form of 🛡 poker, the cards are shuffled and cut. The structure when it
comes to blinds, order of betting and the way 🛡 the communal cards are dealt are
identical to ordinary Texas Hold’em and Omaha.
The player to the dealer's left places
the 🛡 small blind and the player to the small blind's left places the big blind. The
dealer then deals five cards 🛡 to each player, and there is a betting round, beginning
with the player to the left of the big blind.
The 🛡 dealer then burns one card and deals
a three-card flop face up to the table. There is a second round 🛡 of betting in which the
player to the left of the dealer acts first.
After the second betting round, each
player 🛡 can discard any number of cards - from zero to five - and receives an equal
number of replacement cards 🛡 from the dealer, as in five card draw poker. If the deck
runs out at this point the muck (consisting 🛡 of earlier players' discards, the burn
card, and the cards of any players who folded in the first betting round) 🛡 is shuffled
to form a new deck from which to deal replacement cards to the later players.
The
dealer burns one 🛡 card and deals one card (the turn card) face up to the table. There is
a third round of betting 🛡 beginning with the player to the left of the dealer.
Finally
the dealer deals a fifth face up card (the river) 🛡 to the table, and there is a fourth
round of betting beginning with the player to the left of the 🛡 dealer.
The Showdown
If
any betting round results in all players but one folding, the last surviving player
immediately takes the pot 🛡 without showing any cards, and this ends the hand.
If more
than one player survives the final round of betting, all 🛡 surviving players show their
cards, and the pot is split between:
The best five-card poker hand (considering only
the five cards 🛡 held by the player)
The best Omaha hand, formed of exactly two of the
player's cards and exactly three of the 🛡 face up cards on the table.
Normal poker hand
ranking applies. It is of course possible for the same player to 🛡 win on both criteria,
and take the whole pot. However, it is common for the pot to be split.
Variations
A
popular 🛡 variation of Sviten Special allows an extra possibility when exchanging cards.
If you decide to exchange only one card, you 🛡 can ask the dealer to give you a
replacement card face up. You can either accept this card, which everyone 🛡 has seen, or
reject it and ask the dealer to deal you another card face down, which you must then
🛡 accept.
Sebastién describes three versions of the one-card exchange rule played in
Celestial Poker in Canada:
The player simply receives one replacement 🛡 card that is not
shown to the other players and has to accept it - i.e. the same as when 🛡 exchanging two
or more cards. This is rarely played. The player is dealt one card face up, which they
can 🛡 reject and take a face-down card in its place, the same as in the Sviten Special
variant above. The player 🛡 is dealt two cards face down, keeps one of them without
showing it, and discards the rejected card face up. 🛡 This third version is the most
popular.
Sviten Special is most popular to play as pot limit and in cash games.
🛡 However, there have been successful tournaments of Sviten Special and even some players
that like to play it as no 🛡 limit (but then the game tends to become quite
crazy).
Communist Pot is a Celestial Poker variation in which everyone at 🛡 the table has
to place an ante of 5× the big blind. There is no betting round after the first 🛡 5 cards
are dealt: the dealer immediately deals the three-card flop. The game then continues in
the normal way.
There are 🛡 several Roll Your Own versions of Celestial Poker. The most
usual is for each player to reveal one of their 🛡 five cards when the turn card has been
dealt, before the third betting round, and a second when the river 🛡 card has been dealt,
before the final betting round.
