This book was imported to barge.org after BARGE 2026, over 20 years after it was published in 2005. While it is a great reference, some things have changed.

This isn’t our work—it is still Roy Cooke and John Bond’s work.

We have a growing list of some things that should be updated:

  1. The right to see all called hands is more or less gone. You have to call down in order to see the hand, not just be dealt in. (See the Afterword.)
  2. The suggestion of a betting line has been tried. At Bay 101, they put the line in and had a big campaign that “The Line Is The Line” and enforced it as suggested here. After a few months, the rule was gone. The line remains on most tables, but it is somewhere between suggestive and decorative.
  3. The TDA has been successful in improving tournament rules, although their resolutions are more in the form of things you should apply to your rulebook, than a rulebook that can be applied.
  4. Many other poker variants have appeared and are fairly common, including Badugi. Those appear in the BARGE rulebook.
  5. “Run it Twice” is in wide use in cardrooms, but not described here.
  6. The rules around burn cards are correct, but it would be helpful to specify the reason for burning, since so many games now use so many cards (such as five-card double-board Omaha). The function of burning is to avoid the possibly-marked card on the top of the deck when a cheat has had plenty of time to spot the mark. But for so many players it is ceremony.
  7. In seven-card stud, the double bet on fourth street for a paired door card has gone from a universal rule to almost unheard of. (Much like stud.)
  8. The telephone rules feel obsolete.

We fixed a couple things in the text anyway, like the URL for the TDA rules, but have refrained from more editorial changes.

Formatting

The Markdown import of this book caused issues, as it usually does. “Article N” headings have been preserved (but probably should be dropped). Page breaks appear in some paragraphs. More exotic glitches also appear and have not yet been corrected.

Robert’s Rules

Bob Ciaffone wrote a rulebook called Robert’s Rules of Poker. It is also quite good. Tim likes this version which has been reformatted in Markdown. With Bob’s passing, this too is falling out of date. It is also not clear who owns the copyright, or how updates to that book can be made.