Poker Moth

Yeah, yeah, it’s been a long time. I’ve been busy conquering the wonderful world of Badugi.

if you’re unfamilliar with Badugi, it works like this: -

It’s lowball draw poker, with three drawing rounds – just like 2-7 Triple Draw. Unlike 27TD, you get four hole cards. The objective is to make the lowest hand possible, with no shared suits. If you can draw a hand which contains four unpaired cards of different suits, you have a Badugi. If you have paired cards or shared suits, you don’t have a Badugi, and any Badugi will beat you, so Ad 2h 3s 3c will lose to Kd Qh Js Tc. If no-one has a Badugi, the best three card hand will win the pot.

It’s a lot of fun, in and of itself, but what makes it truly fantastic is that no-one knows how to play it. Literally, no-one. The game originated in Korea, (and is sometimes known as Korean poker), and although it’s been spread on a few other sites  (Doyle’s Room offers it, I believe), there’s an incredible lack of information about Badugi strategy on the internet, and some of the strategy articles up there are just plain wrong. This is particularly strange because it’s really not that complicated; once you’ve worked out the basic mechanics of the game, most plays are obvious and automatic. And yet! No-one else seems to have grasped the fundamentals yet, and I am cleaning up.

It’s the wild frontier of poker, or something. There are no books. There are no strategy articles on Full Tilt. It’s the levellest playing-field of all, and if you know what you’re doing, you have a HUGE edge. Currently, Stars are only spreading STTs and 50c/$1 limit ring games, and I’ve been focusing on the STTs; I have a ROI of over 130% across all limits, and better still, I’m showing up on the upper echelons of the weekly leaderboards for low-limit STTs (across all variants) on Stars, which is something I couldn’t get near to playing Hold’em. My best run of form was eleven straight STT cashes, playing $3.40 and $5.50 STTs. ELEVEN! Including six wins. I’ve also had a couple of bad streaks (it can be a punishing game, especially if you get a loose table where you can’t protect a made hand from five or six people drawing at you, which is all too common), but overall I’m running at 75% ITM, which is what scientists are calling pretty sick.

Of course, what with this being frontier poker, and with a fairly small pool of players on Stars, I’m not going to be offering any strategy advice on this blog just yet. After 100 STTs, I reckon I’ve encountered two, maybe three players who have any clue what they’re doing, and I’m quite happy with that situation currently. But I’ll say this – if you have any understanding of the mechanics of draw poker, sit down with a pen and paper and work out the odds on key propositions, such as catching a Badugi card with one draw to come, and the odds of improving a strong two card draw to a hand that can beat an opponent drawing one card (and they draw to all sorts of nonsense; the biggest school of fish are the players who’ll draw one to a Jack, or worse…).

Or… don’t. Leave me alone in my Badugi paradise, please. It’s a completely skill-free game, designed for luckbox chasers, and it’s probably rigged. Yeah, that’s exactly what it is…