Badugi Hand Strength
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.
- 4.8% of Badugis are 7 high.
- 1.7% of Badugis are 6 high.
- 0.7% of Badugis are 5 high.
- 0.2% of Badugis are 4 high.
Heads-up Pots in Badugi
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.
Badugi is a new game but the software developers are already out in force (Woohoo!!) If like me you love analysing your game, checking stats and graphs then I have some great news:
PokerHands is a poker tracker, that will read your hand historys into a database. Once in the database this software will enable you to replay hands, create graphs & analyse various aspects of your game. This software is still under development but Cartridge Software are constantly releasing working beta versions, which are free to download and use.
Features:
- Works with PokerStars, FullTilt & Everest Poker.
- Support for Badugi, 5 Card Draw & Hold’em
- High quality graphs
- Tournament reports
- Session stats
- Starting hand stats
- Heads-up display
Screenshots:
Troutulator is a freeware poker equity simulator that supports the following games:
- Badugi, with multiple draws
- 2-7 Triple Draw, with multiple draws
- 7 Card Stud hi, with hand ranges
- 7 Card Stud hi/lo 8/better, with hand ranges
Screenshots:
Overcards.com have a stack of scripts available for all forms of poker these are all open source, easy to customise and FREE!.
Features:
- Chip Reloaders
- Smart note taking
- Gamepad support
- Table navigators
- Buddy lists
- Bet timer
- Mouse wheel bet sizing
