Super Duper Short Deck

I am here to champion the Cadillac of, no wait, the Great Game of… no, that’s not it either, the Numpty Fest of Short Deck Poker.

 

Like many others, I recently signed up to GGPoker to play the WSOP. GG have a “Honeymoon” promotion for new players, which is 30 days of daily challenges, which get progressively more difficult as the rewards for completing them get better. One of the missions was “play 50 hands of Short Deck poker”, so I did.

 

Short Deck has always seemed to be an unnecessary luxury to me, yet another variation for the sake of variation. In fairness, my knowledge of Short Deck is limited to hearing which millionaire has won an obscene amount of Yen in the latest Triton event. The wizards are ever closer to solving hold’em, seems like Short Deck (or Hold’em 6+ as it’s also known) has been invented so that the highrollers can blow off some steam, gamble it up or claw back some equity. I dunno, I’m eeking it out on normal hold’em, why on earth would I get involved in some niche version?

I’ll tell you why:

 

No-one knows what they are doing in Short Deck poker.

 

That makes playing Super Duper Short Deck absolutely joyous. Free from the aspirations of GTO, it’s a complete mish mash. Players aren’t paying attention to pot odds, bet sizing is all over the place, there’s no cross platform uniformity and I have to admit I had been playing for weeks before I even thought to look up anything on strategy (a flush beats a full house by the way) and yet I am still consistently winning.

 

There’s two things I really want to emphasise:

• I have no idea what I’m doing.
• I am consistently winning.

That is why you should join the Short Deck Smackdown. Here I am giving it the big talk, like someone who knows better but I really want to stress the fact that I don’t, I don’t have a clue, but as far as I can tell, neither does anyone else.

And it’s actually pretty freeing to play in environment where you can just accept no-one has a clue, it takes the edge off the game, villain calls with junk and gets there? Well, I think we can forgive them, because, you know, I don’t know what I’m doing, they don’t know any better either, so let’s just write off that bad beat, doesn’t really matter now does it? Just a game after all, and that’s the beauty of it. Is this the reason it came about? Those GTO wizards and rich business men looking to simply enjoy a nice game of cards? I hope so. I am, of course, nowhere near that level, but as the small stakes appear to be a licence to print money, hopefully I can work my way up the ladder.

In summary:

• Short deck is enjoyable to play.
• Short deck is easy to win.

 

What more could you want from a game of poker? I might need to work on the name though, not sure what Short Deck Free For All moniker has the right ring to it.

 

Answers on a postcard or in comments below with suggestions!