Razzdugi, as it’s name implies, is a split pot game in stud format. You are trying to make the lowest 5 cards for the Razz half and the lowest Badugi (4 distinct rainbow cards, or if neither player completes the Badugi then you compare the 3 lowest offsuit cards etc). For added spice the “super” term means you get an extra down card initially that you pitch. We’ll join this hand on 5th street so you can ignore the super part other than knowing it makes the two hole cards much more likely to be good because the players got to choose two out of three to start. The hidden cards are shown in parenthesis.

Hero has (Ah3c)6s4sKs, Villain has (xx)Jh9h8d. Villain, a regular but someone not that experienced in this particular game (as you might have guessed from his hand selection), leads into me. I suspect he is viewing the hand from the simplistic perspective of “I’m ahead right now” rather than being actually mathematically ahead. I had opened into a lot of playable up cards behind me which means my first three cards have to be three unsuited low cards. So even though I bricked on 5th street my hand is still pretty strong. If he hits perfect perfect he “tops” out at an 8 low for the Razz half. His 5th could potentially have made him a weak but complete Badugi. My Badugi is obviously incomplete because my board is all the same suit but I’m drawing to a very strong Badugi. In addition, I’m a favorite to lock in the Razz half.

I didn’t know the exact math at the time but when he leads it looks like a clear raise for me. I know I’m a favorite on the Razz side, though I don’t know exactly how much. If he is making the bad mistake of betting without a 4 card Badugi also then I must be a substantial favorite overall. If he has the Badugi then I’m not sure. I raise and he reraises. I get cold feet and just call (a mistake in hindsight, I just assumed he must have a Badugi and I’m still drawing).

Here is what the math looks like on 5th street when I looked it up. I just assign him two good hole cards, the first image is if he doesn’t have a Badugi already, the second one is if he does.

As you can see, even when he has a Badugi we are basically flipping and when he doesn’t I’m a big favorite. I figured his reraise made it much more likely he had completed his Badugi but if I could see the exact math I would have put in another raise.

On sixth street we both brick. I pair the king and he pairs the 8 and it’s not a distinct suit. Here is the math when he doesn't have the Badugi and when he does.

It’s kind of a wash and he’s more likely to have a Badugi so this street is simple. He bets and I call.

On the last card I bricked again, pairing the Ace. He bet again. Well that sucks, my big draw didn’t come in on either side. The razz half is obviously lost but the pot is big so I make the crying call with my 3 card Badugi A34. It turns out he didn’t have a Badugi. So I’m relieved to get half the pot but it shows how putting in that extra bet on 5th street was important. Putting extra bets in when you are a 70% favorite is what limit mix poker is all about. These games are very swingy but when you get that kind of edge you have to maximize it.

He's from Montreal but his Arab name probably made me click on an article leading up to the final table. A bit like the Daniel Weinman run, he had struggled over the summer leading up to the main event. He was ready to head home when a chance encounter with a fellow Montreal poker player convinced him to stick around for the Main. He jumped in a main event satellite and won a seat.

But the part of the story that I was most curious about was how he described his nothing to lose approach during the main event. In interviews he talks about playing each day like he had a plane to catch. He would check out of his hotel assuming it was his bustout day and when he made the next day he would get a new room. He said he really didn't care and this approach allowed him to play fearlessly. This, and I'm sure an ungodly amount of luck, propelled him to the final 9. I like a lot about this but I'm also fascinated by the fact that I've heard recommendations for the exact opposite approach i.e. book your flights and accommodations assuming a deep run so that you visualize and assume success. I guess there's more than one way to skin a cat.

Our friend's approach was going swimmingly but this year they paused the main for several weeks before playing out the final table. The pause was reminiscent of the November Nine era (who else is old enough to remember the first November Nine in 2008 when Peter Eastgate won?). Rami said in interviews later that he wished they had just played on. Once he took a break for several weeks and all the media and his friends were reminding him he was playing for 10 million dollars, it became much more challenging to not care. Maybe this hurt him in the end, that's something we'll never really know.

I definitely appreciate this idea of not caring as a superpower in no limit tournaments. I've often played with players who don't care and it's extremely difficult to play against. No limit tournaments definitely have a certain amount of "game of chicken" to them. If you actually don't care you've already won the game of chicken.

But the thing that struck me about the Rami story is that it really did seem like he didn't care. It wasn't simply a mental trick he was pulling off. He didn't care until he did and then he didn't have his superpower any more. To my mind the guys who truly have this superpower, and prove it with repeated deep runs, are the guys who manage to just project a lack of caring while slyly being extremely strategic. Caring (and therefore being motivated to be thoughtful and calculating) while appearing not to care, that could be the holy grail of big bet tournament poker.

Poker controversies aside two players in this mold who come to mind are Ren Lin and Maurice Hawkins. Both of these guys are talkers, a bit shifty and just super convincing that the things that worry us mere mortals (like getting stacked, bubbling etc) don't bother them in the least. I remember being hand for hand on a tournament bubble and hearing Ren Lin hooting and hollering several tables over. I wasn't even at his table and he had me convinced he didn't care about anything as mundane as ICM. He was there to win or die and he acted like both outcomes were equally satisfactory. It's some kind of theatre but it clearly helps them win.

In theory, the transition (that has been largely invisible) will be completed by tomorrow. To the legal system a completely new entity bought a small Seattle area portion of a much larger multi-state empire that was restructuring in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. That purchase was for $28 million, the empire overall was once worth almost ten times that amount but this particular piece of it is still highly profitable. In the previous newsletter I explained how this new entity was in fact run by, if you will allow the obvious pun, the same Persson. I explained the undeniable value of the Casino Caribbean and why it's coveted. The last part of the story might explain why there was so much maneuvering, enter the role of the unions.

The early history of Maverick in Washington shows a surprising cosiness between the management and the union. The company was decidedly neutral in 2019 when the Teamsters Local 117 became the exclusive bargaining representative for the workers. It was historic in the sense that these were the first unionized workers in the gaming industry in Washington state. The union even praised the CEO and the management. Maybe it was altruistic, or maybe it was a strategy in their attempt to lobby in Olympia for sports betting expansion, an attempt that ultimately failed.

Whatever the reason the subsequent years were objectively brutal. Borrowing costs rose, and the pandemic massively disrupted operations. There was soaring inflation with corresponding rising expenses related to the wages and benefits of the workers. During the same period profitability declined. It is documented that by the summer of 2024 S&P Global Ratings characterized the situation as unsustainable. A year later they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

To get a bit wonkish there are two section numbers, 1113 and 363 from the bankruptcy code we should discuss and how it pertains to the story of the union. When a unionized company is restructuring within bankruptcy, Section 1113 provides a framework for how the company can extricate itself from its collective bargaining agreement. It is an onerous process and Congress deliberately set the bar high in an attempt to protect unionized workers.

Bankruptcy lawyers might instead look to Section 363 which basically lets a bankrupt company sell off assets with the magic words "free and clear". In an effort to make distressed assets more appealing and thus improve their chances of some kind of continuity the code lets a new company buy an asset without assuming any of the baggage. The code doesn't quite seem to have kept up with the ingenuity of capitalism though. It only tangentially foresaw what actually happened in this case.

In the eyes of the bankruptcy court the old company, laden with debt, sold off a piece (aka PokerCo) to a brand new company free and clear. The new company is not bound by the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that was in place. While 1113 protects the CBA, a 363 sale does not. The counterintuitive part is that the new buyer (if they are the highest bidder at auction) can in fact be a group organized by some of the same people involved on the other side of the sale.

The auction and sale process happened relatively quickly but the union was in the loop and court documents show they were notified. If they were going to have success challenging this it seems they would have needed to object before the judge approved the 363 sale. For whatever reason they did not. Weeks later they challenged the sale in court on grounds similar to what we have alluded to already, that it's basically the same group buying back their own businesses but shedding the union obligations. This challenge proved unsuccessful. It might have had more chance had they intervened before the sale was affirmed by the court initially. As it stands my understanding is that the previously accrued pensions and other benefits would be safe but no further contributions would be forthcoming.

One aspect of the union's legal challenge draws attention to a really interesting and perhaps unfortunate detail. Federal labor law is not oblivious to this kind of thing. Successorship doctrine in the law would determine whether a new company assuming such a business that is already unionized has any obligations to recognize the old arrangement. The precedent was set by something called the Burns standard from a case in 1972. It doesn't just say, oh this insider is the same guy both selling and buying this asset. Instead it looks at the new company more from the perspective of the people working there. This may be the same business serving the same customers but if less than half the prior union workers are involved in the new enterprise then it's ok. I'm sure this precedent was expected to be helpful but you can guess how capitalism has adapted since. It's not hard to imagine how this could have exactly the opposite effect to the original spirit of protecting the workers.

If you've followed along to the end of this story you might be interested in some of the same lingering details I was. Why did the Maverick website go blank and why are the games currently listed on something called Western Summit Group that nobody had heard of? How did the new (and completely different) company stay on the right side of the successorship doctrine and still end up being called Maverick as if nothing happened at all? I'll dive into some of that for the premium subscribers on this supplemental post

The original company was actually registered as RunitOneTime LLC simply doing business as Maveri…

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If you aren’t from around these parts let me first clarify that we aren’t talking about the actual Caribbean. Casino Caribbean is located near the small city of Kirkland in the state of Washington. If that location rings a bell you are probably a frugal Costco shopper. The retailer had its original headquarters there and has used the name Kirkland as it’s house brand.

Casino Caribbean in Kirkland is a unique property in a number of ways. It’s single building is actually two different gaming businesses, with two different gaming licenses per Washington state law. One side of the building is the poker room I’ve played in on and off for years. That side is officially Caribbean Cardroom and has a street address slightly offset from that of the other side of the building. That other side is home to Casino Caribbean, a collection of house banked table games. It should come as no surprise that the table game side is significantly more profitable than the poker side.

The other critical attribute of this place is due to a historical anomaly. Casino Caribbean came into being in the mid 2000s at a time when gaming businesses had already been outlawed by the city of Kirkland. But the casino is actually in an area called Kingsgate and at that time Kingsgate was not part of the city of Kirkland. The Kirkland city rules about gaming didn’t apply to Kingsgate. In 2009 the city of Kirkland annexed Kingsgate but in doing so they carved out a special exemption for this preexisting casino and cardroom. It was a significant cash cow and employed a lot of people. The result seems to have gifted Casino Caribbean and the adjoining Caribbean Cardroom a monopoly of sorts. This is hugely significant when you consider that Microsoft is located nearby and the whole area is considered suburban and affluent. Kirkland has a high concentration of millionaires and it’s median household income is more than double the national average. To have the only gambling businesses in the city of Kirkland is pretty special. When you combine this with the fact that the adjoining and equally affluent cities of Redmond and Bellevue also ban gaming... well you get the picture.

In 2019 the original owners sold to an aggressively expanding multi-state company called Maverick for an undisclosed sum (but given some known comparables likely a very large number). Maverick and it’s founder and CEO Eric Persson went on a buying spree adding multiple other Washington casinos to its portfolio. They soon had over 1700 employees across 19 properties in the state. These employees unionized becoming the first unionized gaming workforce in the state and the record seems to suggest that Maverick didn’t object. At the time the union even publicly praised the company.

Fast forward to 2025 and the intervening years had not been too pretty. Laden with debt the company filed for chapter 11. This is where the story of the Caribbean gets really interesting. While Maverick as a whole might have been struggling, the Caribbean properties themselves were still quite profitable. This is where Eric Persson pulls off something kind of extraordinary. To normies like us who don’t understand the intricacies of bankruptcy it makes no sense. As part of the reorganization of Maverick he was overseeing he isolated a few of Maverick’s successful properties in the greater Seattle area and grouped them into what was called PokerCo. The crown jewel of these was the aforementioned Caribbean Casino, ironically not actually a poker room at all. These assets were broken off and PokerCo was sold at auction. The winning bid came from a new group, but unbelievably that group was spearheaded by Eric Persson himself.

Next week I’ll share what I’ve understood about this so called section 363 sale and what “free and clear” meant for the unionized employees.

Badugi is that triple draw game where you are trying to make 4 unique cards of different suits (a Badugi). You get three shots to make your rainbow hand, while also trying to have cards that are as low as possible. When comparing two made Badugi hands you are comparing from the highest (worst) card down, with aces being low. So in the battle of these two premium Badugi hands Ah,2c,3d,7s loses to 2s,3h,5d,6c.

Because the game appears so far from regular poker, people seem to use this as an excuse to forget some basic poker principles. Even though the game is weird you still have to put people on ranges, calculate pot odds and do some math to figure out whether you should chase or not. Consider the following two scenarios.

You are playing 6 handed, it folds to the cutoff who raises and you defend the big blind with As2c but your other two cards will obviously be tossed (e.g. As2c8ckd, the club is duplicated and the king is trash). You draw two and he pats, uh oh. You hit the 8d and Td improving to As2c8d, the extra diamond is no good. Your opponent was obviously dealt a four card Badugi to start. You check, he bets, you call. Now it’s the second draw, you draw one and he’s still pat.

Compare that to a guy opening utg and you defend the same hand from the big blind. You draw two and he draws one. You make that same As2c8d. You check because he drew fewer than you, he bets and you call. It turns out he did improve because when you draw one he pats behind.

Many players are looking at these spots as if they were equivalent. You have the same exact draw in both spots and your opponent already has a Badugi heading into the second draw in both. So what’s the big deal? Well we have to remember to put our opponent on a range. Yes, he has a Badugi but what kind of Badugi he has will tell us if we’re in really bad shape or not. So let’s rewind.

When folded to the cutoff players will play any Badugi they are dealt, even the roughest ones. Being dealt a pat Badugi isn’t that easy (each player has about a 6% chance of being dealt a pat Badugi). The average strength Badugi of a guy opening all Badugis is going to be Q7xx. How does this compare to the average Badugi of the guy in the second example?

That guy’s Badugi is quite a bit stronger because he built it. When he opened in early position and drew one it signified three low rainbow cards. When he now completes his Badugi by drawing to a strong three card hand, his average Badugi is going to be somewhere between an 8dugi and a 9dugi. That is a considerably stronger range than the first guy.

If you as the big blind find yourself heading into the last draw still needing to improve, in the first scenario you are almost certainly still live with 17%ish equity. In the second case, you’d have considerably less equity and it’s a big IF that you are even drawing live. It’s not unrealistic that he made a 7dugi already and you’re cooked, as the kids say.

You’ll be facing a big bet street. In the first scenario you’ll have to do a bunch of math and pot odds and implied odds guesses and it’s probably quite close. In the second case you’d have a pretty easy fold.

Badugi is just kinda fun and that’s enough to convince a lot of players to wing it and have fun. But if that means they are ignoring some basic concepts and perhaps routinely calling big bet streets drawing dead, well needless to say there is some opportunity there.

Figure skater Ilia Malinin went into the Winter Olympics men’s free skate final undefeated in almost three years. His dominance of the sport was so complete the media refered to him as the Quad God (he was the first skater to land a quadruple Axel in competition). Even if you only tangentially followed the Olympics you probably know that he endured one of the highest profile collapses in modern sport. He aborted on his signature move and fell twice in a shocking performance that took him well out of medal contention.

Last March Tottenham Hotspur was in the Champions League (club soccer’s premier competition) round of 16 against Atletico Madrid. Despite “Spurs” running deep in this competition they were really struggling in the Premier League. Their manager at the time made the controversial decision to bench their veteran goalkeeper and hand a Champions League debut to a young goalie called Antonin Kinsky. He had not started a game since the prior October. He ended up making two high profile blunders in the first few minutes gifting goals to the opponent. The manager humiliatingly withdrew him 17 minutes into the game, an action likely without precedent at this level of the sport. Anyone watching would have assumed they were watching the demise of a young sporting career.

Rewinding a little further back but specifically about poker, in the 2021 50k players championship Ryan Leng became a household poker name for the so called “worst fold in the history of poker”. Getting 11 to 1 on the river in limit holdem in a hand where he would have busted Jungleman (who goes on to win) he talks himself into a fold.

https://www.poker.org/poker-tours/wsop-2021-ryan-leng-reflects-on-the-worst-fold-in-the-history-of-poker-vs.-dan-cates-ajGDh7v9rLdY/

On the biggest stage what would be your biggest fear? Something like these examples maybe? You are supposed to be an expert, the best, and instead are made to look a complete fool in the most public way possible. That should be completely crushing, but just maybe it is freeing also. When you realize your worst fear you can then just get on with the business of doing your best.

I’ve definitely cherry picked some feel good examples but these guys show how you can move beyond these most public of humiliations. Ilia Malinin went on to win his third consecutive title at the World Figure Skating Championship. Kinsky started Tottenham’s last seven regular season games in the Premier League and played a pivotal role in saving them from relegation to the lower division. He was rewarded with a new contract. Ryan Leng has tournament cashes totaling over a million dollars since that high profile hand. Maybe there’s truth to the old adage that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

In one of the episodes called “The Sprint” they bring in Olympic sprinter Shawn Crawford to race against a giraffe and then against a zebra. With all due respect to recreational poker players one of the things that characterizes them is that, just like a giraffe or a zebra, you don’t really know what kind of race they are going to run. Just like a giraffe or a zebra you know they are certainly capable of running fast, probably very fast. But will they? You’d rather they didn’t.

In a hilarious “reality” TV moment the show brought in Carl Lewis to provide expert commentary. In the zebra race the screen flashes a “Keys to Victory” graphic on the screen. Apparently Carl Lewis was of the opinion that one of the keys for the zebra was that it “Must realize it’s a race”. Despite an initial false start by the zebra, at the second attempt the zebra very much realizes it’s in a race and out sprints Shawn Crawford.

This always reminds me of the delicate dynamic when an action player is in your poker game. If they are playing extra badly, it is very often the case that they are capable of playing much much better. They just can’t be bothered to race, that’s not what they are there for. People have many reasons for splashing around in a game and probably the worst thing you can do is draw their attention to the fact that they are in a race. Sometimes if you do or say the wrong thing they will level up their game. Even worse they might splash around against everyone else and level up their game specifically against you. Suddenly a guy who doesn’t have a fold button finds it just for you. And you probably weren’t bluffing because up until now he was a calling station.

The social engineering required to keep that guy in just the right frame of mind to spew chips is one of those valuable soft skills in poker. Enjoy some of the highlights from one of the worst shows in television history:

On the hand that crippled me we were playing 200/400/400 and I believe I was the hijack. To add insult to injury we went on break immediately after that hand. I don’t remember for sure if we were eight or nine handed at the time so I’m not exactly sure how many hands I was going to get to see. I probably should have used that time to think about what hands I was supposed to shove when I came back before the blind hit me. I just remember thinking, approximately 3 big blinds... gonna have to shove pretty wide in the next few hands. But of course it’s not 3 big blinds because the blinds were going up to 300/600/600. I don’t even have 2 big blinds. But I’m still steamed from the hand that crippled me and assuming my shove hand will be obvious.

The first hand I got dealt was probably a legitimate fold given that I had a couple more I could look at. It was something like J4os. I think even on 2bb you can let that go. This is where my brain starts to malfunction. I’m dealt 64s utg+1 and I just tossed it in the muck on autopilot. This is pretty clearly a blunder. Now don’t get me wrong, I knew I was supposed to shove lots of stuff, I just thought it would speak to me in an obvious way and that I wouldn’t need to think. I found myself now getting dealt in utg with just under 2bb and looking down at 75os. When you imagine your poker journey do you see yourself at the final table of the Main getting Aces or do you see yourself with 2bb in a satellite under the gun getting dealt 75os 😂... the stuff of poker dreams guys.

My only excuse is that, let’s face it, we don’t find ourselves in these spots very often. But I should have known way better than to fold here, but I folded. You just have to shove this hand blind. You can’t take the big blind on that stack. When you are on an ultra short stack you get in these situations where shoving this hand is -ev but taking a random hand in the big blind and posting the big blind ante for half your stack is even worse. So you have to know to take the lesser evil.

Ok, this must have cost me less than $5 of real money equivalent but one could easily be in exactly the same situation much later in a bigger tournament. I simply had 5% of a starting stack in a small satellite but that same 2bb could be worth way more in a different context.

To make things even more embarrassing the old timer sitting next to me was telling me how it’s a blind shove after the hand.

Playing something resembling a full schedule most summers I have a lot of experience with this mathematical near certainty. Most events you play will come fast on the heels of a prior disappointment. To have any chance at all you have to commit fully to the tournament you are in, fail, and get up and do it again. To do that you have to quickly let go of the previous one that you really really put yourself into. To play a tournament series is to ride an emotional rollercoaster, eat, sleep, and repeat. I did a lot of that this summer. Hang on tightly, let go lightly.

But one of the hardest things of all is to play strong in the main event after a full summer of disappointment. It helps a lot to have a bit of momentum, a deep run in something during the summer before you take your seat in the main. This is part of the reason I was so impressed with Daniel Weinman's main event win in 2023. I had played with him that summer and things weren't going well. The guy was an absolute pleasure to play with, smiling, never complaining. But from the conversation I knew he'd played plenty of events that summer and the results had been disappointing. If you look up his cashes in June 2023 when he was playing every day, they barely add up to 10k. His next cash was 12 million. I remember that when I'm trying to psych myself up for the next one, and the next one.

That said, if there was ever a summer where things got so bad I really don't mind taking a break from poker during the main, this would be the one. The prescription for detaching from the WSOP this year is tea, scones and World Cup games.

It was reaching the business end of the tournament about 20 spots from the money. I had been holding steady around 100k in chips which was slightly above average but missed two big draws back to back in A-5 TD. Now instead of flying high near 200k I was one of the short stacks. I chipped up slightly in O8 and found myself playing Razz with only 50k in chips left. This is when I played this critical Razz hand.

It’s folded to me and I’m showing 5 with (93) buried. There were two guys with low cards behind me, one guy showing an Ace the other guy showing a Six. So the first question I face is should I open this hand? I’m far from an expert on Razz math but this looked like a favorable enough spot and my situation is such that I can’t forgo a spot like this even though it’s not a slam dunk. I complete to 3k and am immediately raised to 6k by the Ace. The six folds. I call. When I looked at the math later my hand is a slight favorite 3 ways when their down cards are unknown. Of course once I’m raised by the Ace we can assign him something like 3 cards to a 7. So now I’m a slight dog. There is 20kish in the pot. He hits 9 and I hit T. He leads 3k and I call as we are still on the small betting round. He’s quite a bit ahead now but it’s far from over. I didn’t know the math but when I looked it up later I’m still around 30% here so easy call. Now it gets even more complicated.

On 5th Street I hit Q and he hits K. So I have (39)5TQ vs (xx)A9K. We can assume he has the 9 low draw. This is one of those spots in Razz where my hand is lower currently but he has more equity. I know that much and I know to check even though I’m showing the lower hand but don’t know the numbers. Again when I looked it up he’s something like a 2-1 favorite still, I thought it was closer. He’s betting 6k on the higher betting streets now, easy call. Pot is approaching 40k.

On 6th Street I brick hitting a Jack and he hits the 2. Ugh! I check he bets. Ok, now I’m probably drawing dead. But I have to stop to consider one possibility. What if he paired, and specifically it’s the 2 we have to wonder about. It’s going to cost 12k to get to showdown, almost the last of my chips. The pot will be over 60k, I have to mull this over as these are completely unfamiliar razz spots for me.

If he paired it’s a flip. If I fold and he has a pair of 2s I’m folding a ton of equity. No 2s were exposed, I don’t have one, it’s one of the low cards he started with at a highish frequency. Other than this I’m struggling to do any kind of coherent math in this high stress situation. If there were no more cards and it was a question of, if he paired I win, I would have called. But even if he paired it’s still a flip and when he doesn’t pair I have to put in another 12k drawing dead. Seems like a fold, so I fold.

But I’m crippled of course and an unlikely comeback doesn’t materialize. He tells me after I was drawing dead and I believe him but that doesn’t really answer the question. If it’s wrong to call there how wrong is it? I know he’s never checking the 2 so how often does it pair him?

You guys are probably better at razz math than me so I’ll turn this one over to the audience. There are 28 cards 7 and lower in the deck. We assume his two hole cards are unique and a rank 7 or lower (and not an Ace since he’s showing an Ace). We’ve seen a few of these low cards and no other 2s have been seen. Help me out here, how often would the deuce pair him?

On this hand I have just over 60k in chips (double a starting stack) and we’re playing 1500/2500/2500. A BigO regular with a big stack limps in early position and I decide to apply maximum pressure and isolate with AhAdQc7s6h. I bet the maximum which is 11,500 (pot limit with the ante not counting preflop). Everyone folds and he calls. Pot is 29.5k and I have about 50k left.

Flop is 234 rainbow with 1 heart and he checks. I’m not exactly sure how to proceed here. On the one hand SPR is low and maybe there’s not a ton of reason to overthink the situation. Maybe I’m just supposed to shovel all the chips in. But if he has the hand I fear (A5xxx) I’m absolutely toast. That’s not to say I’m going to fold at this SPR but it sure sucks betting myself into that hand. If he doesn’t have it I have the low. What about if he has a high only hand... something like KQQJT? Well then he is toast and if I bet he will fold a hand that has very little equity. If I check back there is a chance this kind of player will start bluffing.

Ok those are the extremes, what if he has something in between? I.e. not the wheel but not a high only hand. Those hands probably still have a fair amount of equity, is there a chance he will fold any of them if I bet? Given the kind of player he was and the SPR, I’m thinking most of the time he’ll just gamble but maybe I could put him in a tough spot.

I decided to check back. I’m in position and I wanted to give him some rope in case he was in really bad shape. There were a lot of cards that could solidify my situation, I had a gutter to the nut straight and backdoor nut hearts. There is no risk of me not being able to get it allin by the river. The turn is the 8h. He bets 20k.

This is a good card for me, giving me the nut flush draw. I have aces, second nut low, a gutshot to the nut straight and the nut flush draw. So I’m never folding turn obviously but if he has the wheel my situation hasn’t improved much. I’m still of the opinion that if he has a high only hand I should force him to decide if he wants to go for a Hail Mary bluff on the end since he acts first. I call. 70k in the pot and I have 30k left.

River is a brick, something like a black T. He puts me allin. Well I made this bed for myself playing the hand this way. I have to give some consideration to folding but the price is absurd and I still have 2nd nut low and a pair of Aces for high. I played it in a way that he would bluff so I can’t fold now. I call.

Good news, I immediately see he doesn’t have 5 in his hand so he can’t bust me. He has a hand I didn’t really expect. A238J. He was bluffing with 2 pair. The bad news is he wins the high with a crappy two pair. Maybe this shows the flaw in how I approached the hand because maybe he folds this hand on the flop if I just use brute force. He has a nice starting hand but hits a difficult flop. In BigO you often have more equity than you expect and if I could have gotten him to fold a hand like this and collected the 30k in the pot that would have been a good outcome.

I also didn’t consider raising the turn! I think maybe it was too shallow to have any fold equity there. Still, if I raise the turn allin, even for just 30k more it absolutely looks like I have the wheel that I slow played on the flop. If he doesn’t have the wheel himself there is an outside chance he’ll fold quite a bit of equity in a big pot.

At the end of the day I’m torn between the complicated way I played it (which I don’t hate) and a much simpler, more forceful approach of over representing my hand to get folds knowing that if he has the wheel I’m probably busting whatever way I play it.

Aria:

+ Some good table side food service options and I value how easy it is to take your breaks in fresh air in a fairly pleasant outdoor environment.

- You will need those outdoor breaks because the Aria summer tournament poker area is one of the worst. Surrounded by loud slots, and a highly trafficked area with some smoke I find it a sensory overload. I only played one event here so far but it will probably be my last. It was very poorly run, and the level of dealing was far below what I would have expected of Aria. In my 7 handed T.O.E event, they made the decision to move to 6 handed a few hours in. That was surprising but welcome, more room and these games play great 6 handed. They set the payouts at 18, one would assume at 3 tables of 6. At about 30 players they confirmed they would redraw at 3 tables but not until then. But then, to our surprise, they did that redraw at 21 players making the tables 7 handed! First, redrawing very near the bubble is a terrible practice. Everything changing right at the most critical moment of the tournament is not fun. It is also bound to screw some player’s carefully considered short stack plan. Going from 7 handed to 6 handed and back to 7 handed on the bubble is bizarre to put it kindly. Also a pet peeve is a tournament director who can’t keep the number of players remaining accurate with under 25 players. That’s just phoning it in.

Wynn (Encore):

+ There are not a lot of more pleasant places on the planet to experience tournament poker. This is one of the few places where poker patrons are assumed to be valuable desirable customers and treated as such. The floor staff here are the best in the business and you should be so lucky as to have Barry, the consummate professional, supervising your event. One trick they do which is simple by impressive, is that they often address you by first name as you approach the tournament area looking for your table. It makes you feel special though they are seeing the player names in the system as they sign up and walk over.

- Other than a couple events at the very beginning (May) and the very end (July) the Wynn understands that the demand for poker in the summer is such that they can set price points pretty high. So while you’ll find $300 and $400 tournaments at the Wynn at other times of the year, the summer is about $1k and higher.

Orleans:

+ The hallmark of the Orleans summer series is large turnouts for creative events at a still meaningful price point. E.g. I played a $600 7 game draw mix that included Dramaha which I’ve never seen in a live tournament. The event got almost 200 players, really good for such a niche mix.

- It’s not exactly uptown and this might deter some of the Vegas Strip only poker clientele that you really want in the games. I’ve had some miserable experiences at the Orleans in the past with cancelled guarantees, cancelled events, events starting late etc. But in the last couple years things seem to have improved a lot. This year I played there several times and can’t fault their effort.

Venetian (Palazzo):

+ Solid all round. It’s conveniently located for drivers as the Palazzo has one of the rare easily accessible and not insane parking garages on the strip. The events are well run, dealers solid enough.

- Hidden away in the shopping area upstairs in the Palazzo nobody comes here by accident. The old room had a prime location at the front of the Venetian and many wondered if this move would lead to the room’s demise. It hasn’t, management still seems committed to poker though their summer series event selection is somewhat uncreative and overly safe.

WSOP (Horseshoe/Paris):

+ The app has been a home run. Newer WSOP attendees have no idea what the lines looked like just a few years ago. For better or worse reentering an event has never been easier. The dealer marks you busted on their tablet and you use the app to buy back in and receive your next seat assignment, sometimes just a couple tables from where you just busted. Even the Wynn can’t match that sophistication where you have to walk back to the cage to buy back in.

- Luckily for me all the mix events seem to be on the Paris side which strikes me as the superior area. The Horseshoe side can be quite the zoo, and the corridor that connects to the ballrooms is narrow and unpleasant in the large field events. From either side it’s hard to get to fresh air. Despite many years since All American Dave, the WSOP hasn’t done a very good job catering to the food needs of their patrons in the “new” location. Even snagging a water at your table isn’t the easiest as the servers can be fairly sparse. Luckily, the WSOP has done a good job in recent years of deploying water stations.

Golden Nugget:

+ Played one event here, a small buyin SORBET tournament. Hats off to the clever naming (it's TORSE + Badugi, but doesn't SORBET sound cool?). They got somewhere around 100 runners for this, super healthy. I didn't play the Grand Series last year so I was curious to see how it was doing. Can't complain, dealing was mostly good. It's definitely not the Wynn in terms of professionalism, dealers speak freely and feel able to use the occasional foul language etc. But that's mostly a good thing especially if they are doing their job well.

- Huge missed opportunity to give the players free Sorbet, I mean talk about low hanging fruit.

Badugi can be a really tilting roller coaster game but like a roller coaster it’s a ton of fun. Ten hours on a roller coaster might be overdoing it though. I don’t always take notes during a tournament but lots of spots came up that I wanted to think about so I happen to have written down a bunch of Badugi hands. I’ll list a couple of them for general consumption and then I’ll include a few more for the die hards (i.e. premium subscribers).

Speaking of notes, Adam Owen sat down next to me, which is a hell of a coincidence because we sat next to each other last year in the same event. He immediately turned to me and said “been to Felixstowe lately?” a reference to a place in England I used to go as a child and clearly something we had talked about last year. I was floored that he had that kind of memory. He probably should have strung me along for longer but he quickly revealed he’d written it in his notes in the WSOP app. A funny one and a good reminder to use that feature (for more than just small talk) because you are bound to run into the same players from event to event over the years.

Anyway, hand #1 is a quick one but kind of subtle and is blind vs blind with the aforementioned Adam Owen. I didn’t need notes to remember that he busted me last year and that he plays a fairly wild version of Badugi, very loose predraw. On this hand it’s folded round to him in the SB and he just completes. I look down at A2xx. I’m fairly confident he’s opening his 2 card draws because he always takes the aggro line. Most players will just open fold a 3 card draw in the SB and either limp or open their 2 cards, but Adam is allergic to folding predraw. So when he open limps in the SB he almost always has a 3 card draw. Against most other players who almost always have a 2 card draw here (or a rough 1 card draw if they are quite unbalanced) I’m hardly pushing any equity and I might just check back for balance purposes. But if I’m almost certain my opponent is going to call and draw 3 I have to raise my two card draws. I raise and he calls and draws 3. I don’t recall anything interesting happening later in the hand, I suspect he didn’t improve much and folded, but the point is just that even in Badugi there are player tendencies and these kinds of reads and minor exploits.

This hand I think was straightforward but it was the beginning of my undoing late into the evening. Folded to the button who opened, I had A23 in the SB and reraised. He raised again, and I called. I drew 1 and he patted. I’m racking my brain trying to remember my 4th card because I think I might have had the classic A23K Badugi which would make this hand even more tilting. Maybe best I don’t remember. The reason I don’t remember is that the King adds “almost” nothing and you basically have to toss it and draw to your ultimate smooth draw. But I miss all three draws, and he tables an annoying KQT8 Badugi, almost the nut worst Badugi, but it beats my unimproved nut 3 card. If I did have a King-dugi to start this was the exceptionally rare case where my starting Kingdugi would have won without drawing. Regardless, I’m 51% to make a Badugi over three draws and with such a good draw this is not the type of hand to get creative with out of position. Had I been in position I could have raised unimproved (maybe after the second draw) and if he breaks I take the lead. Out of position though you’d have to pat and sacrifice your draw (otherwise he sees you draw and won’t break). No point in taking a massive draw and sacrificing it’s draw potential. I also knew I was up against a strong opponent as he was playing props with Jerry Wong at the table :).

Here are a few more Badugi hands for the folks who can’t get enough of this stuff.

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In the video I mention debit cards, this one is still a mystery to me and I'd appreciate if anyone can clarify their experience in the comments. One guy at the table yesterday told me that he verified his debit card as the payment method and when he clicked through in the app he was asked to confirm a screen that showed a fee but then in reality it was processed without a fee. This guy was then confidently wrong about a number of things so he could be an unreliable narrator. It's definitely confusing, but it would be good to know for sure if this is everyone's experience. In the meantime I will be using the cash into the Paris Tournament Account method which worked smoothly for me with no fee.

Whatever you do you will need to make one trip into that Player Services room (look for the sign in one of the pics below).

One tip from my experience when entering this room at Paris from a short line, the attendant insisted that I show them my WSOP app logged in with the waiver step signed, total rewards linked etc. If you've opened the app before you know what I mean. If it's your first time with it then spend some time fiddling to prepare and make sure you know how to log into that app with your account before going to this room. Inside you can choose to verify a card (with the caveat about fees) or get in the short line that I got in for funding a Paris Tournament Account with cash. I think there is a $2500 minimum for this, but then you have no more lines, can rebuy and immediately walk to your new table etc.

I ended up busting the 1500 O8 after the last break of the night losing two flips in quick succession. I could have busted much earlier when this interesting hand came up.

It's been limped in two spots and I see TsTh3h3d in the SB. This is kind of a sucker hand in O8 but of course I'm getting absurd odds so I complete. The BB annoyingly raises and they all call and I feel obligated to call now though I hate playing this hand out of position. Flop AT7. I flop well but there is lots of danger, the random BB raise could sometimes be AA in which case I'm in big trouble. There are two cards to a low and a lot of the time half the pot will get shut out for me. If it comes in on the turn I'm immediately getting freerolled. I check and it checks through so we can pretty much assume the BB doesn't have AA. Turn is a Q. This strikes me as one of the better cards for me (4 card Omaha hi/lo is different from Omaha hi and from BigO in this regard). There is a decent chance nobody has KJ because the two guys in later position checked the flop when they would have had a chance to bet if they held a KQJx type drawing hand. The BB is rarely raising preflop oop with that kind of hand in hi/lo. So I decide to lead the big bet street and I'm called by the BB and one of the mp limpers. Having not been raised I think my hand is good the vast majority of the time. The river gets very interesting, a deuce. It has brought in a low but it has two things going for it. It's disconnected so if my high was good on the turn (which I strongly believed it was) then it's still good. I also happen to have 33 in my hand which helps block them from having the nut low 34.

I decide to lead because I think my set is good for high and I'm blocking the nut low so maybe there's an outside chance I can get bad lows to fold. I would love to scoop, there's a little thin value three ways on the high side and I'd hate to concede half to someone who would have folded their emergency low. But this is where it gets weird. The BB raises! The mp guy folds and I call. As seems to be the rule of blockers the BB does indeed have 34 for nut low and we chop. I was relieved because I thought there was a chance he got tricky with AA and I'd be left with fumes.

But the reality was even crazier when the mp player surveys the showdown and says he folded a set of queens to the raise! This hand would have crippled me and the only reason I survived is because I chose to bet my blockers to the low and the guy who had the nut low anyway raised prompting the guy with the best high to fold. His explanation, reasonable enough, is he presumed my lead on the turn was probably the broadway straight. I'm sure he would have called with his set for one bet but facing 2 bets and potentially facing a raise or more after calling he decided to fold.

I ran this good fortune up to almost 3X the starting stack before sadly running it right back down again late at night before getting to bag chips. Onwards and hopefully upwards.

Good luck this summer everyone.

Last week we played the very last session and I had the dubious honor of being already out of contention to finish in the top three for the season. So I was only playing for the money of the current session. Multiple other players however, were vying for a top three finish (more or less three equal prizes of 10k each). You can already guess that this creates a really interesting tournament dynamic and sets up the following curious ICM situation.

At the final table with about 8 of us left the table draw was interesting. On the surface it wasn't a good draw. A solid player was on my immediate left and two notably strong players were to his left. However, of the two strong players, the guy two to my left was a shorter stack and the one three to my left was a medium stack. I had them both covered. More importantly, both of those players were in the top 3 in season points, the guy two seats over was slightly below the one three seats over. Also among the 8 were a couple players who had an outside chance of catching them by finishing first.

This created a really interesting dynamic where the player three to my left had a very strong incentive to just outlast the player two to my left because then that player couldn't catch up to him in the points. The main event seat as a prize for the season dwarfed what you could win in this individual session. But the player two to my left was short enough that if it was opened in front of him he could mostly only fold or shove. All of this setup is for me to ask the following question.

When folded to me in the cutoff, with those two guys in the blinds, how wide could I open? I'm trying to accumulate chips to finish in the top 4 that day, they're primarily trying to outlast each other. I'm also wondering how you would model this in an ICM tool?

Even though I didn't know the exact answer I suspected it was pretty darn wide. In fact, I decided it was so favorable I would just go ahead and do it with 100% of hands. I would min open and I figured even if the BB defended (with the SB having folded), he would be under so much ICM pressure that I could just bluff with impunity.

I think the situation only came up once or twice and I was glad I didn't bother to look at my cards and just raise. The spot for them came with an order of magnitude more pressure and it would be silly not to take advantage of it. These types of extreme ICM spots are part of what makes tournament poker fascinating and luckily I was able to parlay it into a third place cash. They didn't mind not cashing, they had Main Event seats.

Even though it was an error I was fully committed to a mental state of playing to win that tournament. Sure I’d like to have that decision back but there are many more occasions over the years where I wish I had just gone for it in that same bloody minded way I did on that hand.

Like we talked about in the past couple weeks, players who lean conservative can get stuck in a “local maximum” despite making a series of pretty good decisions. When you visualize the tournament as a search of a hilly landscape and you refuse to consider any move but one that is surely uphill, the higher ground you find is most often not the ultimate peak. ICM is important, cashes are important, final tables are important, but the pyramid nature of the payouts means you have to give yourself enough of a chance to win the thing outright otherwise you’re just giving up too big a chunk of the prize money.

Last week we likened this sensible but conservative approach to a hill climbing heuristic that gets stuck in a local maximum. So why don’t we continue with that analogy and consider other search heuristics that solve that problem. We’ll look at a search technique that is more likely to find a global maximum. Maybe this could lead to some insights into a more aggressive brand of tournament poker. So let’s get crazy and talk about “simulated annealing”. For brevity I’m just going to throw out some ideas without going too deep. I’m guessing most of my readers are not here for the academic rigour. That’s good because I don’t have answers to many of the questions you will probably have. Think of this as the first level of a brainstorm.

Annealing is a process from metallurgy where you alter the properties of a material by changing the temperature. For our purposes you can think of “Simulated Annealing” as a search technique (like our hill climb heuristic from before) but is characterized by inserting some randomness in the search. So when you are comparing two states, in a hill climb you will only go to higher ground, in simulated annealing you will sometimes accept moving to lower ground. That “sometimes” is what this is all about. Simulated annealing, borrowing from its metallurgy inspiration, defines a conceptual “temperature” T. When T is high you accept moving to lower ground (a worse state) at a high probability. As T lowers you become greedier, you become less likely to accept a move lower and instead stay where you are. As T tends towards zero you basically only accept higher states and your algorithm is tending towards a simple localized hill climb.

What does this mean? Instead of always insisting on moving to higher ground sometimes you randomly accept lower ground. At the beginning (T is high) you accept this often, later (T gets low) you accept this rarely. What does this do for a search? It helps you not get stuck in a local maximum by exploring your search space more broadly by injecting randomness. Here’s a visualization from Wikipedia to help you get it. It repeatedly compares two points. It prefers the higher of the two but accepts the lower of the two at some probability that decreases as T gets lower. This is why at the beginning you see the red line jumping around but it settles down as T approaches zero.

How could any of this be relevant to poker tournaments and what the heck is T anyway? Well that’s the million dollar question and like I said, this is a brainstorm. I don’t have answers, just an inkling that there is something here that is worth exploring further. Remember, I promised you crazy talk.

Obviously, I don’t think we should be going out of our way to make a -ev decision at random. But it does make sense to be more willing to crank up variance at certain stages and to lower the accepted variance at other times. Thinking about when and how to do this is the whole point of this thought exercise. If you have 20bb near the bubble your play should be very close to what ICM poker says it should be. Taking a flip would be objectively bad. But a very loose 3 bet to isolate heads up 80bb deep in an early level? A speculative triple barrel bluff that won’t bust you if it backfires? There are times in the tournament where not only should we be ok with some chaos, we should embrace it.

If you are curious if there is any empirical evidence to suggest there is something wrong with the slow and steady approach in tournaments I’ve included a little bonus material here for the most wonkish among you.

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I have a couple of things to get out of the way before diving into today’s newsletter. First a disclaimer, today’s content could be a helpful tournament visualization you haven’t seen anywhere else. It could also just be crazy talk. Feel free to poke at its flaws in the comments, I will be the first to admit these are not fully formed ideas.

Second, as we head into WSOP season in a couple weeks, I’m considering adding an extra post each week just for the duration of the series. My thinking is that these would be for everyone rather than behind a paywall. But I need a little encouragement, so now would be a fantastic time to become a paid subscriber. There are other ways to engage too. I really appreciate the folks who like my posts in the Substack app, chat in the comments or share the post with others. If you get something from this newsletter each week now is a great time to let me know by supporting the work. Every paid sub really does motivate me to improve this content for everyone.

Ok, now for that crazy talk I promised you. Maybe you are already an aggressive tournament player always shooting for first. I’m not. I have cash game DNA but at least I’m self-aware enough to understand this can be a liability in tournaments. I also lean into theory and unfortunately tournament theory just exacerbates this inclination towards conservatism. What do I mean?

In theory, when you take a 50/50 flip in a tournament you lose a bit regardless of the outcome (chips you gain are worth less than chips you lose). This is true even early on when you perceive yourself to be far from the effects of ICM. In latter stages where stack and payout distributions might increase your risk premium needed you might theoretically lose money even when allin as a substantial favorite. All these theoretical considerations are forces that can push you towards conservative decisions. But you have to be living under a rock to not have observed anecdotally how tournaments seem to reward aggressive play. This dichotomy is the tournament poker conundrum.

What if we think about tournaments in a different way? In my young pup computer science days we studied heuristic search techniques. It’s so distant from the actual revolution we are experiencing now that what I studied seems fairly quaint. I’m almost embarrassed to describe it as AI, though that’s what it was called 25+ years ago. If I give you a simple example you’ll understand what I’m talking about and how it relates to poker tournaments.

Suppose your algorithm is searching the landscape looking for the highest point. A basic strategy could be to look at your immediate surroundings and compare your options. You decide on a heuristic that you should always go uphill. You move to a neighboring position that is higher than where you are right now. You repeat this, checking your surroundings and incrementally moving higher. You have a hard and fast rule not to move downwards and eventually you reach a point where all the neighboring options are lower than where you are currently. Congratulations, you’ve reached the top of a hill.

To me this feels like how a conservative player approaches tournaments. all quite reasonable in a vacuum. The hill you have reached is like the tournament cash. You can visualize this hilly landscape and you are standing on one of the hills. You made a sensible decision each step of the way but there are two big problems.

One problem with this kind of incremental and “greedy” hill climbing approach, as any student of computer science will be quick to bring up, is that you will easily get stuck in a “local maximum”. Yes, you are on a hill and all the ground immediately next to you is lower, however, you are not at the global maximum. You are on one of the baby hills. You haven’t won the tournament, instead, you maximized your chances of cashing.

The other problem is that you don’t get to patiently meander around this hilly landscape like you can in a cash game. The landscape is getting flooded with water. As you explore your surroundings the water is rising (the blinds). Getting to slightly higher ground helps but time is working against you. By the time you find a hill you might be on the verge of drowning. And even if you haven’t drowned yet, and you can see some higher hill you’d like to reach (perhaps now willing to abandon your upwards only heuristic), the valley between you and that higher hill is flooded. Earlier, there might have been a path to get to that higher hill before the waters rose. Only the global maximum, the highest hill, protrudes above the water in the end. You may have cashed, but you drown on that lower hill wondering about a different path you could have considered.

Next week, in the last installment, lets consider some other ways we could have searched this landscape where we didn’t get stuck at a local maximum. When you look at the tournament as this kind of bigger picture search problem, there might be other ways we can conduct our search that gives us a better chance of finding the global maximum instead of frequently drowning on a min-cash hill.

A few years into my poker career I knew my in-laws were not the most supportive of my chosen profession. I was mostly a mid stakes no limit holdem cash game grinder in that phase and my results showed a consistency that I thought was very impressive. I figured, I'll show my father-in-law some of my stats. At that stage of the poker boom not only did I not have any down years, I barely had any down months. I don't think he was particularly impressed, nor did it alter his perception of my work in any significant way. But hold that thought for a moment. Think about what it means as a poker player to hardly ever have a down month. Awesome right? Hmm, maybe not.

Also, a long time ago now, I began writing a poker newsletter. This substack is the modern incarnation of a labour of love I started way back. I had a chat with a smart friend of mine (and a backer in my tournaments) as I was relatively new to newsletters and the metrics people use to measure such things. I told him that in a typical week about half the people receiving my newsletter were engaging with it in some way (opening, clicking on a link etc). I still remember his very thoughtful answer, "wow, that rate is way too high". I was confused, what do you mean it's too high? I want a high rate of engagement, right? He explained that a very high engagement rate showed I was clearly not casting my net wide enough. 25% engagement on a 1000 person distribution list is reaching way more readers than 50% on a 300 person list. Having such a high proportion of the list actually reading it showed I was way too conservative in my outreach. I should embrace being rejected if I wanted to reach more readers.

I don't really know how many times I need to be taught this lesson, that some "failure" is a key part of success. And in endeavors that involve risk, while many people are naturally too risky the opposite is also very much a thing. Failing too rarely is a sure sign of being overly conservative. Playing poker full time and, at the time, not having down months was not the badge of honor I thought it was. My buddy and I came up with a mantra, "Lose More!". It was devised primarily as a tournament mindset, a good way to get a naturally conservative gambler to get in the right frame of mind for a high risk high reward endeavor. But like my favorite parable of the scorpion and the frog, it's hard to overcome your nature even when you objectively know it's in your long term self-interest.

Even though I'm sort of in the latter stages of my career and I'm not likely to be blasting off in big buyin tournaments like I might have imagined in my youth, I find myself thinking a lot about this problem and how it adversely affects tournament performance. It's pretty clear that not having enough gamble can hinder one's success. Next week, I'm going to share how I've been thinking about this dilemma through the lens of getting stuck in a "local maximum", to borrow from the world of mathematics and computer science. I've been considering this human behavior and how it can lead to ruts of local optimization at the expense of the actual goal of global optimization. See you next week.

Duece to seven triple draw is one of the more popular games in the mix but with new players comes the challenge of putting them on hands. Normally in these games you are supposed to open for a raise but it’s not uncommon to see newer players open limp. In this hand one such player open limps from middle position and I’m right behind him with 642xx. In these looser games it’s hard to thin the field even by making the players behind you face a double bet. I’m also not ahead of the limper’s range anyway so one is kind of resigned to playing a lot of multiway hands. If the pot is going to be multiway it’s probably better to keep it small when the equities run really close at the beginning. Bloating the pot with no edge just serves to make their bad calls less bad if your equity share in the pot starts to pull away from theirs later in the hand.

I limp behind and a generally tight solid player (with occasional random spew/bluffs in him) raises behind me. We all call. On the first draw the limper to my right draws 1. Ok, you probably don’t need me to tell you that is weird and bad. He shouldn’t have open limps in his range anyway but open limping a one card draw is particularly egregious. Typically new players do this with a rough one card draw that they are confused how to play. Like if they don’t have a deuce in their hand they might do something like this. Anyway he draws 1 and I draw 2 and I’m surprised to see the tighter player behind me draw 2 (he’s the kind of player who would mostly limp behind with a 2 card draw). So we can conclude the first guy has a rough one card draw and the raiser is drawing 2 to a wheel. At this point the guy to my right realizes he drew the least and bets. I improve to 8642x and call, the player behind me just calls. It goes Pat, draw 1, draw 1 and the guy to my right leads. On this second draw I improve to 98642. This is a pretty awkward spot.

The guy who is pat to my right has some kind of rough hand, but how rough? Normally when a pat player is leading into you a 98 is no good but this guy is new to the game and could potentially do this with worse. I’m putting him somewhere in the vicinity of an 876xx but not much better than that given how he’s played the hand. My other problem is the tight player behind me drew one to what I’m sure was a smooth draw, very likely to a 7. I don’t think I should fold but should I call or raise? Calling puts fewer bets in when I’m not sure if I’m ahead, lets me see what the guy behind me has in mind and keeps the guy to my right from breaking if I happen to be ahead. I can still decide on the end whether to draw to my 86 or pat my 98. Raising has merit as there is a decent chance my hand is best and I could get the player behind me to fold a one card draw that would call if he could see my hand. I take the passive route and it costs me the pot. I call, the player behind me raises, the player to my right unexpectedly just folds and I decide to just fold because I’m probably drawing dead. After we fold the “tight” player very happily shows us his 97. Ugh. Not only was I very live tossing the nine and drawing to the 86 I’m also sure that had I raised the player behind me would assume his 97 wasn’t good and would break it.

In this stud8 hand we are playing “super” which is a variant where you get an extra down card and you have to toss one of the three before 4th street. I’m dealt (25x)A I complete, a guy behind me showing a 6 calls and a player showing a 4 raises. Huh. Call call. I pair my A, the guy behind hits an 8 and the third street raiser hits a 7. I lead, call and then the guy showing 47 on his board raises. Huh. Call call. On 5th street the raiser hits a deuce, me and the other guy brick both of us getting a Ten. Check check and the (xx)472 guy bets.

Given the action I’m suspecting this guy started with rolled up 4s. In normal stud8 it’s easy to discount people being rolled up but in super stud8 that extra card to choose from at the start makes it much more likely. The guy raised on third when I completed with an A showing and raised again when I paired the A on fourth. He has rolled up 4s the majority of the time, the rest of the time he has a made low with a straight draw. I have one pair and need runner runner to make a low. I fold. The other guy chases which I’m happy about because I get to confirm my suspicion when the guy tables 4s full of 7s.

One regular in the game insists we play stud8 as “super” and I think I’m starting to see the wisdom of it. It tends to create more action as people have more ways to make a good hand. Generally the players do a poor job of adjusting to how much tighter the definition of “good” should be when you start with an extra down card.