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Badugi!
by LearnedfromTV on 12/13/08
Pokerstars opened up 10/20 badugi a couple days ago and I'm addicted. I was playing around with starting hand strategy today, but I'm still sorting out relative strengths of 2-card, 3-card, and badugi starting hands. When no one is pat, it is so important to have the best three-card hand (unlike in triple draw, if you and your opponent draw 1 and both miss, whoever had the best draw always wins; so e.g. that final draw is like 80/20 instead of 55/45 or 60/40).
Getting there is by far the most important badugi skill, but 2a and 2b seem to be not missing bets when you have the best 3-card and avoiding getting stuck in pots with second-best (or worse) 3-card, especially in headsup pots. If people have good snowing frequencies, the pat vs draw situations get more interesting, but the Stars game doesn't seem to have much of that.
Only ~6.5% of hands are dealt badugis, and 3-card 6s or better are only another 6%, so while a full-ring EP strategy (I think Badugi is usually dealt 7-handed, though the Stars game is 8-handed) of folding everything but badugis and strong 3-cards makes sense, in late position and in shorthanded games it's pretty obvious that's too tight.
The question is how to compare good 2-card starting hands and rough 3-card starting hands. Clearly A23x > A27x > A2xx, but it isn't clear to me where, say, 654x should fall. It's a lot harder to turn a 3-card into a badugi than it is to turn a 2-card into a 3-card. Even though 765x will make more badugis than A2xx, A2xx will end up with a lot of better 3-cards, and 765x can't really promote itself to a better 3-card because it's so rough. On a single draw, A2xx has 10* outs twice to improve to beat 765x, and 765x only has 10* outs once to improve to a badugi, and a couple more to notch A27 (but none of the other three-cards A2xx can make); with three draws it has to be the equity favorite. It's not that hard to figure out a one-card draw's equity versus a pat badugi. Finding, for example, the weakest 3-card hand that is favored over A2xx would be a lot trickier, but the general problem of comparing 2-card hands to 3-card hands is something I want to work on.
* - I didn't account for card removal (blockers in the other hand) there, which affects the 2-card hands improvement chances a bit more than the 3-card's.
A bit of trivia: A2xx is the single most common starting hand. Any specific badugi is ~ 0.1% of the dealt hands, A23x is the most common 3-card at ~0.33%, and A2xx is ~1.3%. (The best two-card and three-card hands are more common than worse hands of the same type because you always discard the worst suited card e.g. As2c3d4d is played as A23 not A24.)
912k vpp and counting...
Getting there is by far the most important badugi skill, but 2a and 2b seem to be not missing bets when you have the best 3-card and avoiding getting stuck in pots with second-best (or worse) 3-card, especially in headsup pots. If people have good snowing frequencies, the pat vs draw situations get more interesting, but the Stars game doesn't seem to have much of that.
Only ~6.5% of hands are dealt badugis, and 3-card 6s or better are only another 6%, so while a full-ring EP strategy (I think Badugi is usually dealt 7-handed, though the Stars game is 8-handed) of folding everything but badugis and strong 3-cards makes sense, in late position and in shorthanded games it's pretty obvious that's too tight.
The question is how to compare good 2-card starting hands and rough 3-card starting hands. Clearly A23x > A27x > A2xx, but it isn't clear to me where, say, 654x should fall. It's a lot harder to turn a 3-card into a badugi than it is to turn a 2-card into a 3-card. Even though 765x will make more badugis than A2xx, A2xx will end up with a lot of better 3-cards, and 765x can't really promote itself to a better 3-card because it's so rough. On a single draw, A2xx has 10* outs twice to improve to beat 765x, and 765x only has 10* outs once to improve to a badugi, and a couple more to notch A27 (but none of the other three-cards A2xx can make); with three draws it has to be the equity favorite. It's not that hard to figure out a one-card draw's equity versus a pat badugi. Finding, for example, the weakest 3-card hand that is favored over A2xx would be a lot trickier, but the general problem of comparing 2-card hands to 3-card hands is something I want to work on.
* - I didn't account for card removal (blockers in the other hand) there, which affects the 2-card hands improvement chances a bit more than the 3-card's.
A bit of trivia: A2xx is the single most common starting hand. Any specific badugi is ~ 0.1% of the dealt hands, A23x is the most common 3-card at ~0.33%, and A2xx is ~1.3%. (The best two-card and three-card hands are more common than worse hands of the same type because you always discard the worst suited card e.g. As2c3d4d is played as A23 not A24.)
912k vpp and counting...
