Breaking a Badugi

[MarkGritter]

This month's Badugi article in the 2+2 magazine refers in passing to the idea that you probably shouldn't break a badugi, and should sometimes call down with three-card hands. This is similar to the idea in my article--- if you believe that your badugi is no good, how often are you really getting the odds to draw?

Suppose it is heads-up on the third round. You were pat with a badugi, bet, and get raised by a player who drew one How big does the pot have to be in order to draw here instead of folding? (I'll ignore your other strategies--- patting or drawing but calling anyway if you miss.)

Let's say you have a J632 badugi and you knew your opponent was drawing to 62A. He raises with J62A or better.

In the best case for you, he doesn't hold one of your outs. (Say, he has xh6c2dAs while you hold Jc6d3s2h.) Thus against his worst holding you have 7 outs and 16% equity (ignoring previous discards.) Your average pot equity is just 8%, which means you need effective odds of better than 11:1 to call. (Sometimes he will hold your ace and you will be even worse off, but bricks you have seen slightly improve your chances.)

Approximate odds for your better hands, calculated the same way:

T632: 13 to 1
9632: 16 to 1
8632: 20 to 1
7632: 26 to 1

If you are getting worse effective odds than this (counting an extra bet on the river) then breaking and folding a three-card hand cannot be correct.

(Figuring out in what circumstances breaking but calling anyway, or patting and check/folding or check/calling are superior might be an interesting exercise.)

[palman]

I understand the point people make of not breaking badugis in spots like this, but many people who try to turn badugi into a pure math excercise will be folding here so often that they'll get abused by anyone making a raise with a good 3 card hoping you'll break/muck.

[MarkGritter]

I didn't say folding was necessarily the right option--- I just noted that if you really need to break to win, then folding is usually better than drawing. Obviously if you didn't need to break than either folding or drawing is a mistake.

(But it is a pure math exercise! One can, in principle, arrive at the game-theoretical frequencies for folding, patting, drawing, etc. And if you have some idea of what your opponent's strategy is, it is just a math problem to come up with an exploitive counter-strategy. "pure math" isn't about assuming that you're beat every time.)

[palman]

The good news is that a large percentage of mid-stakes badugi players (40/80 mix players) are fairly easy to read and either bluff way too much, or never bluff, making such decisions easier.

In general, in tighter games where pots are smaller, you should be folding alot more, but in looser multi-way games you should be doing your breaking. The highest I've ever played is 1/2, but even then those games can often get so LAG that the pots are large enough to warrant calling and breaking, it just depends whether you have the right mix. Inherently, people that like badugi are those that are willing to gamble. Finding players that will call 2BB cold still drawing isn't uncommon.