Sviten Special

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Also known as Celestial Poker, or Céleste in French.

TLDR

Dramaha, except that a player who draws exactly one card sees the replacement face up and may reject it for another.

Forced Money

The game is played with a button and blinds.

Dealing Procedure

Each player is dealt five cards face down, followed by a round of betting at the small bet limit.

Three community cards are placed face up. This is followed by a round of betting at the small bet limit.

Then each player in turn discards zero to five cards from their hand and is dealt an equal number of replacement cards face down (unless the discard is exactly one card).

A player who discards exactly one card is dealt the replacement face up. Before the next player draws, that player must either keep the face-up card or reject it. A rejected card is discarded and the player is dealt another replacement face down, which must be kept.

One additional community card is placed face up. This is followed by a round of betting at the big bet limit.

One additional community card is placed face up. This is followed by a round of betting at the big bet limit. This is followed by a showdown.

Evaluating the Showdown

The best Omaha high hand (using exactly two cards from the player’s hand and exactly three cards from the board) and the best Five-card Draw hand (using all five cards from the player’s hand) split the pot.

Variations

Sviten Flush is Sviten Special where the draw half of the pot goes to the best flush instead of the best five-card poker hand. A player’s flush is made from the cards of a single suit in their hand; their other cards are ignored.

A flush with more cards beats a flush with fewer cards. Flushes with the same number of cards are compared by their highest card, then their next highest card, and so on, with aces high. Straights don’t count, so A♠ K♠ Q♠ J♠ T♠ is the best possible flush and 6♥ 5♥ 4♥ 3♥ 2♥ is merely the worst five-card flush.

Example: Player A holds K♥ 9♥ 6♥ 2♥ Q♠ and Player B holds A♣ J♣ 8♣ 4♣ 3♦. Both have four-card flushes, and Player B’s ace-high flush is better. Player C holds 7♠ 5♠ 4♠ 3♠ 2♠, a five-card flush, and beats both.

Since there are only four suits, every five-card hand contains at least a two-card flush.

Notes

Sviten Special is usually played pot-limit.

Sviten Special is widely credited to Anders “Bengan” Bengtsson, who devised it in 2004 at his Sviten poker club in Stockholm. It is popular in the Nordic countries, but an essentially identical game was played in French Canada in the 1980s. See Pagat and PokerNews.

Sviten Flush comes from a post on Bill Mawer’s All the Chips Substack.