The game that you see on ESPN, Eddie, is "Texas Hold 'Em". That game is intentionally played with 5 upcards, which are common cards that everyone uses.

I was talking about the very rare situation in a 7 card stud game, where at least five of the eight players stay in for all seven cards, necessitating the use of one common card for everyone to use as their 7th card.

The type of game you are now describing, and i guess you wee describing before but I didn't realize it, where the winners of each table meet at a "final table", is really a "tournament" style game.

What I'm guessing the do is get, let's say 24 players, charge them $350 each to get in the tournament, and then seat them at 3 or 4 tables.

Then each player gets, let's say, $500 in "tournament chips", and start off playing a geme with a $20 maximum bet. Every hour or so, as some players accumulate more tournamnet chips at the expense of the other players, they raise the stakes.

Eventually, after about 3-4 hours of that I'd guess, there are maybe two players left at each table, or 6-8 players in total, who now hold all of the original $12,000 in tournament chips.

These remaining players get to sit at the "final table", and battle it out, again with the stakes being raised every hour so. The raising of the stakes periodically is what prevents the game from lasting forever.

Since the house had each of the 24 players in your game buy in for $350, there is $8,400 in the "prize pool". This has nothing to do with the $12,000 in tournament chips that were in play. Out of the $8,400, the house might keep maybe $2,400 as their share, and give the first, second, and third place finishers $3,000, $2,000, and $1,000, respectively, as their prizes.

And BTW, the Hold 'Em games on ESPN that you see are the "final tables" from a tournament which began with hundreds of players