A good friend of mine has asked me to each him how to play Badugi. He is a strong Hold’em player with a couple of years experience but like most when it comes to Badugi he is a little lost.

So far he knows the rules of Badugi and I have given him some guidelines for starting hands. He knows the hand rankings and I have shown him the Badugi software post on here. He has started to play limit Badugi to get a general feel for the game but will be moving on to PL Badugi after he has played a few thousand hands.

I was reviewing a session for him today and noticed a few spots where he wasn’t playing optimally, over the next few posts I will be showing you his mistakes and how you can avoid repeating them.

Badugi Multi-way

In multi-way pots he was often folding reasonable 2 and 3 card hands because he thought being out of position would make him easy to exploit. Well position is very important but what he didn’t realize is he was getting protection from all the added players in the hand. If 4+ players are seeing the first draw its very likely someone will complete a Badugi so it becomes more of a pot odds game.

Multi-way bluffing is much less common because players generally realize someone will complete a Badugi most of the time. Players are much more likely to play in a straight forward manner taking the huge pot odds they are usually offered to try and scope the big pot in front of them.

Good hands to play multi-way that you would not normally play are hands that need to hit to have showdown value. An example would be 854 or 765, as 3 card hands these are trash but if you can get in multi-way their value increases. If you do hit a Badugi make sure you re-raise to protect your hand, now you don’t want it to be multi-way any longer. Scope that pot!

Latter on when my friend switches to PL Badugi he will have to be much more careful about how he plays these hands, in general he would be folding them unless the table is particularly passive pre-flop. Position in PL Badugi is extremely important as now you can actually buy pots & bully the other players.

In the next article I will focus on a few heads-up situations.

Tags: cash game, multi-way, Strategy, tournament, video