If you are a new player it’s quite tough to and work out just how strong your hand actually is. Indeed many regulars will often overplay or underplay their hands based on their percieved strength.
This is just a quick statistical list but it should help you guage just how strong your hand is:
80.2% of Badugis include 10s Jacks Queens or Kings.
12.2% of Badugis are in the 9 high to 8 high range.
Our last article focused on multi-way hands so this time I’m going to write about the differences in how we’d play hands when the pot gets to be heads-up. I’ll start with an example: We are playing limit Badugi and are on the big blind with the hand Ac3d8s3s:
Situation 1:
The first player to act raises, 3 other people call so we are left with a decision. Our hand is too weak to re-raise and too strong to fold. The pot is offering us great odds so we decide to call. Now for the hard part, how many cards should we draw?
We could drop 2 cards and hope to try and make a nut type hand but that won’t really be necessary to win the pot most of the time. If we are drawing 2 cards it’s even less likely we will make a Badugi with the first draw, which is when our hand will be most valuable. An 8 low Badugi will scope most of the time even multi-way, if you lose its just a little bad variance. So we decide to draw 1 card, hopefully make our hand and win a nice pot.
Situation 2:
The first player to act raises and everyone folds around to you. Now what? Again we are in that situation too weak to re-raise & too strong to fold so again we call.
How many cards should we draw? An 8 high Badugi would win HU most of the time as well but what you should realize is that more often than not a good 3 card Badugi will win in HU situations. A38 has no showdown value HU so this time we will change 2 cards hoping to make a good 3 card hand early. If we don’t then its no huge loss, our implied odds were good but it didn’t work out.
If we are playing PL Badugi situation 2 would be an instant fold since we are showing so much weakness it makes it very easy for the villain in the hand to put pressure on us. Situations like this make for a good snow attempt.
Snowing: This is when a player will stand pat and bluff that they have a made Badugi. There will be an article on snowing in the very near future so stay tuned.
