Badugi Poker Rocks

Badugi is one part razz, one part draw poker, and a whole lot of fun—depending on who you talk to.

Enteratlantis is now offering this unique style of poker, which originated in Korea. The site is running both poker tournaments and sit-and-gos, although the latter is seldom attracting the higher-limits players.

The more frugal players are giving it a try, though, and they seem to be enjoying it.

At a $5.50 buy-in, nine-handed sit-and-go today, Enteratlantis player "Sesamo" was playing the game for the first time and was poker chip leader with four players left.

"It's nice to have something different," said Sesamo.

Both he and "aaa222xx," another first-timer to the game, said they would very likely play again. Of course, it helps that they both made the money.

Badugi is a draw poker game that is similar to lowball, where players try to get the four lowest cards possible, all of different suits. So, A-2-3-4, all of different suits, would be the best badugi hand a player could have.

There are three different drawing opportunities, where players can draw anywhere from zero to four cards, and a betting round occurs after each one.

Time will tell if the game will become popular online. DoylesRoom had offered badugi a couple of years ago but withdrew the game from its selection due to lack of customer interest.

Enteratlantis is clearly trying to spark and maintain interest, setting up small-stakes tourneys throughout the day. A $2.20 buy-in tournament on Sunday attracted 112 entrants.

In Las Vegas, players can find a fairly regular mixed-games format at Bellagio, which contains badugi, for as cheap as $2-$4 and as expensive as $4,000-$8,000. The Imperial Palace poker room features badugi as part of its mixed games, as well, every Sunday at 7 p.m. Treasure Island also offers a standalone $3-$6 badugi game, although there are rarely enough players to form a game.

Poker Data

Data base is a very important tool. It helps you collect information in such an organized way that statistics can be analysed by the expert for good use, and for me, to crack down my boredom, I refer for public entertainment a copy of poker player X's Poker Tracker stats.

This data history is said to drawn from over 30,000 hands of play.

Most Dealt Poker Hand: J8o - 346 times
Least Dealt Hand: 94s - 82 times

Highest Winning % Hand - AA 86.67%
Lowest Winning % Hand - Q8s 0.82%

Most Tournament Money Won - ATo
Most Tournament Money Lost - 93o

Most Raised Hand Pre-Flop - JJ 79.70%
Least Raised Hand Pre-Flop - 21 Hands on 0%

Big Hands:

Straight Flush x 2
Four of a Kind x 13

Most Played Against Players:
Private information, no exposure here, LOL

This information inspires me a lot, and what's your feeling after seeing it? Can it compare with yours?

Poker Term Post-it

In the world of internet poker, some people chat a lot, some people write a lot. And I prefer to read. Actually, some professionals are really good at writing poker articles with incisive analysis and humorous metaphors. To help you too suck juice from these pro-talk, I offer you introduction of some useful poker jargons.

1. Muck
As a noun! It refers to the area on the table where all of the dead cards are placed. Basically, there are folded cards.
As a verb! It means to fold.

2. UTG
Abbreviation for: Under the Gun. It is the position to the left of the big blind which acts first before board cards are dealt. Of course, you can't choose positions at the poker table. As an early position, somehow it is admitted to be a disadvantage.

3. Rock
It's a nickname for a type of player who will play only top hands. They are very good at folding most of their losers, but will not aggressively bet their winners, which in result not making much money. They are also easily bullied out of pots because of their tight nature.

Please stayed tuned for my upcoming articles on poker term and poker rules!

One Round of Omaha

Omaha is played with blinds and dealer button which means that the positions are fixed throughout the whole hand. The dealer button is a white plate that marks the dealer position. The blinds are two mandatory bets made before the cards are dealt. The blinds are used to open play and force action. The first player to the left of the dealer posts the small blind and the second player posts the big blind. The small blind is the size of half a big blind.

The dealer gives the players four cards face down, the first betting round begins and turn goes clockwise starting with the poker player to the left of the dealer. The players may do one of the following actions depending on what is possible at the moment: check, bet, raise, call or fold.

When the first betting round is finished the dealer places three cards open on the poker table, these are the flop cards. Betting resumes and remaining players make their move.
When the second betting round is finished the dealer places one card face up on the table. Betting resumes as usual. This is the turn card.

When the third betting round is finished the dealer places the fifth and last card open on the table. This is the river card. Betting resumes but when the last person has acted it's a showdown of the cards. The person who bet or raised last shows the cards first. The other players may choose to show or fold their hands depending if they have a better hand. The player with the best poker hand wins the pot. (In Omaha high-low the pot is split into a high hand and a low hand pot if there is a low hand qualifier)

To determine the best poker hand a player has to use two of the four hole cards with three of the five community cards.

The dealer button is moved one step to the left and a new hand may begin.

Poker Odds Tutorial: Lesson 1

If you hold two suited cards, what are the poker odds of flopping 2 of that same suit? How did you calculate this?

All unknown cards including burns are considered to be part of the deck. You calculate by using fractions, putting your outs on top (numerator) and the total cards remaining on bottom (denominator). For the 3 flop cards, the denominators are 50, 49, and 48.

Calculating something like flopping a set is simple addition … { 2/50 + 2/49 + 2/48 }. But with two of a suit, the numerator of the fraction changes when the suit hits. There are 11 of the suit left and you need to hit 2 of them. So, it's more complex than one single addition or multiplication problem.

Rather than write some massive nested expression, I'll try and explain this in a fun and interesting way. Let's say you're holding 2 clubs.

The first card of the flop is a club 11/50 times … 22% of the time, exactly. We go on from there.

22% of the time, you hit that first club. You will need only one of those other 2 cards to be a club … the odds of that are fairly high, { 10/49 + 10/48 }, about 42%.

The other 78% of the time, you'd need both the remaining cards to be clubs … the odds of that are fairly low, { 11/49 * 10/48 }, about 4.5%.

We multiply 22% by the first bracketed expression, which is how often it will happen.

We multiply 78% by the second bracketed expression, which is how often that will happen.

We add these two figures together and arrive at 12.7%, almost exactly 1 in 8 times.

If you also want to include situations where you flop all 3 of that suit, we add the odds of that, { 11/50 * 10/49 * 9/48 } which is very, very low, 0.8%, to the final mix.

Therefore we can say that the odds of flopping at least 2 of suit X, when you already hold 2 of suit X, is ever so slightly better than 1 in 7.5, almost identical to the odds of flopping a set.

Let's make a stand for internet poker. Start from a poker blog first …