Where did all the stud games go? They've been put out to pasture, for the most part. In Vegas casinos, you'll find five hold 'em games for every stud game, if you're lucky.
It wasn't always this way. Hold 'em played second fiddle to 7-card stud for many years. Stud was the game to play, whether in a casino poker room or on your kitchen table. While hold 'em was already making some strides in popularity, its meteoric transformation into housewife's choice can probably be attributed to the World Poker Tour and its hole-card cameras, together with ESPN's coverage of the 2003 World Series of Poker, where a rather ordinary-looking accountant from Tennessee named Chris Moneymaker won poker's biggest championship. His win gave millions the thought that they too could catch lightning in a bottle and become poker stars.
Both stud and hold 'em are 7-card games. In stud, each player receives his own cards. In hold 'em, each player receives two cards, plus there are five community cards. Many argue over which is the more difficult game or which requires more skill. That argument will probably never be answered conclusively. What's generally agreed upon, however, is that hold 'em is more of an "action" game: After playing hold 'em for a while, to many people, playing stud feels like riding a golf cart after a Ferrari. Some people will always love stud though, and for all of you, here's a list of Las Vegas card rooms that still claim to deal the game with regularity. It's doubtful hold 'em's current grip on the poker community will wane in our times, however.
