Do the Badugi

Sunday was even drearier than Saturday, so I spent the whole day around the house doing not much of anything. Not-much-of-anything being not the most interesting of endeavors, I pulled up Poker.com and checked out the fast and furious action at the Badugi tables. To my great surprise, there were actually two people playing Badugi for real money.

I couldn't not try to take advantage of this situation. I sat down with $10 and gave it a spin. Can't say that I met with much success. At one point I was down almost half my buy-in, but recovered a bit before ending the session down about $1.

Poker.com also had another Badugi freeroll that I signed up for. This site is a bit odd. It's the only one I've seen whose official time is in the central time zone. Or maybe they don't observe Daylight Shifting Time. This kind of messed me up because I was expecting it to start at 4:15pm EDT and it didn't actually start until 5:15pm.

I know this thing is a freeroll and I shouldn't be complaining about "free" anything, but I feel compelled to mention that the structure of this thing sucks. $1000 stack, blinds start at 10/20 and increase every 7 minutes. If your first couple shots at getting involved with a pot don't end successfully, you very quickly find yourself needing to push it all in and hope for the best.

This situation is not improved by the large number of players who obviously have no idea how to play the game. One guy at my first table must have thought it was some variation on Omaha. A couple times he called a final bet and turned over two big pair. And he had actually been raising during the hand. This kind of thing could be considered as an effective increase in the blinds, making the cost of early play far more expensive than it would be with players who had a clue.

I didn't even make it to the first break, though it's good evidence supporting my complaint that I outlasted almost two-thirds of the field. At least this time I didn't get seated at a table full of no-shows.

I need to give this a bit more thought, but some cursory consideration of counting outs in this game would indicate very conservative play and early exits from non-made hands are the best strategy. My gut says you should stay out of most hands that require you to draw more than one card. The only exception would be if you can play cheap and have nothing worse than a two-card 5 to start from.

Specific strategy aside, I am positive that the vast majority of people I've seen play this game play far, far too loose. If you could find a reliable game online, you could probably kill by simply considering the odds and your outs. It's clear most players don't.