Badugi Nights

I had a new favourite game: Badugi. 

I discovered the game last year, and after playing just three tournaments, I came up with the following sticky note guide to Badugi to keep myself on the straight and narrow:

• You get dealt 4 cards, a 'badugi' is when you have one of each suit. The lower the cards the better. Pairs count against you. You get three rounds of drawing and betting.
• Got a badugi? BET BIG!
• Drawing to a good badugi? Try get there cheap.
• Someone else betting big? They have a badugi already. Don't waste chips chasing a poor draw.

Obviously there's more to it than that but that was my initial strategic observations and seemed to be enough to make the money about half the time on the nightly pot limit badugi tournament on Pokerstars. It is almost the perfect tournament for me, since becoming a parent I'm very much time restricted in what poker I can play, but this tournament; begins around 9pm which is ideal, it gets 80-100 players meaning it finishes around midnight, again perfect, and the buy-in is $4.40 which for a game I don't really know how to play is perfect, cheap enough to learn the game, not so cheap it's pointless. Normally, I'm not a fan of bounty tournaments, which this one is but it helps flatten out the variance as I learned the game, so actually even that's pretty good in this instance. 

After a month of playing badugi a few nights a week, SCOOP 2023 was on and I was very excited to play my first badugi SCOOP, hoping for big event glory, alas, it was limit badugi and not pot limit, and I discovered it was a very different game. Limit vs pot limit betting changed the game, and I was not ready for it, I felt like it took away the ability to bully and bluff when you sensed weakness in your opponent, it was half the game the nightly bounty was, a pale imitation. I checked the rest of the SCOOP schedule, no more badugi. I checked the last WCOOP schedule, it only had fixed limit badugi too. I checked the normal Pokerstars schedule, and there was nothing bigger than the nightly $4.40 bounty badugi I was playing. My hopes of glory in a new game were gone, there was nothing to aim for. Despondent, I stopped playing badugi.

Following along with the news from this years WSOP, badugi popped back into my consciousness with the results of the second ever WSOP badugi event taking place a few weeks ago, which inspired me to give it another whirl. 

I have a new favourite game: Badugi (again).  

Just as described above, the nightly bounty pot limit badugi hasn't changed at all, making it pretty much my perfect nightly tournament once again. I have been playing whenever I can and it's been going well, not in terms of profits, but I really do enjoy it and it ticks a lot of boxes for me, I have yet to win one outright, so far I have peaked at back to back fourth place finishes, but I have the drive and I will get better! 

Alas, there are only a few badugi tournaments on the Pokerstars schedule:

• 4pm $3.30 limit badugi
• 9pm $4.40 pot limit PKO badugi
• 3am $3.30 limit badugi

Those limit games are on at pretty unplayable times for me but what's this? Next week there's a $5.50 MicroMillions pot limit badugi event! PERFECT! Well not quite, it's on at 5:30pm, which is right bang on the start of family time. There is two hours of late reg, which could help but ah dunno, I'm going to have to play that by ear. 

What else can we look forward too on the badugi horizons? Well, last years WCOOP had just the three badugi events, all on the same night the $11, $109 and $1050 fixed limit tournaments, and this year's SCOOP just gone had $22, $109 and $530 fixed limit versions, so I expect something along those lines in this years WCOOP. This gives me a goal to work towards, to play the biggest badugi game I can but comes with some work to do, I need to get some fixed limit under my belt before then because I did not do well AT ALL in last year's SCOOP attempt. In the mean time, it's more badugi nights for me!