sounds interesting actually.. do the other players know if you swap or not ?
or is it hidden to the other players ?
They do know and they also see how many cards you swap. The cards themselves are not revealed, but I think it would be a cool twist if they were because it would add an element similar to 7 card stud where you see a lot of information out on the table in the form of dead outs. Some great bluffs possible but I only played playchip so success rate of those bluffs is minimal. I expect in more fishy games that
bluffing would only happen in very few situations since this game is more polarized than holdem. You have to also be careful as average hand strength at showdown goes up a bit, but from my playing so far it's not a super huge jump in hand strength (but i think that's just variance + people playing any 2 and I should be seeing many more stronger showdowns in a more serious game).
The complexity this adds to holdem strategy is very interesting. It feels like a sort of crossbread between draw, PLO, and holdem to me.
It feels like positional advantage is amplified in terms of seeing how many cards players before you swap and if they swap at all, but also negated by the fact that swapping increases preflop hand strength. 3 bet dynamics are definitely very interesting. You can swap 1 card and 4bet or shove as a
bluff for example (repping KK or AA).
I'm always on the lookout for holdem variants that either lower variance or increase skill edges enough to iron out variance, I'm curious to see where swap holdem falls in that regard. The variance seems lower than PLO so far but I could be mistaken. Maybe a hi-lo variant of this would be spicy.
Also, they should have just called it texas swap'em.
