The Poker Moth

In all my years, I have never seen an OPR record as bad as this one -

mohibmojo @ Pokerstars

At the time of witing, he’s played 52 MTTs, and has an ITM record of… 0%. He’s on my table now, and it’s not hard to see how he’s achieved this record – although he’s currently the chip leader on my table, thanks to some ridiculous suckouts.

In a strange way, I have some respect for a player who can take a 52* game losing streak in his stride; everyone must have a cut-off point where they decide they can’t be arsed anymore; I wonder when this guy will give up?

*53.

*edit* Less than 24 hours later, and he’s 0/63. That’s a pretty impressive day’s work, right there, which led me to check OPR to see just how long it’s taken him to rack up this streak. He’s been playing for just over a fortnight.

So, I virused my laptop. Kind of embarrassing; the license on my anti-virus software expired, and I was too lazy to renew it. So, inevitably, I got a virus. What’s worse, cultural anthropologists have identified my laptop as an early example of the Steampunk vogue, although that’s just because it’s old and crusty. Or, to put it another way, the CD drive is borked, which meant that after many, many years of searching, I finally found a way to make reinstalling Windows even more irritating than usual.

Sorry, needed to vent. Anyway, the upshot of all this was that when I finally got WIndows up and running again, I had a pretty messy laptop, with tons of installed programs that Windows didn’t recognise. I began to tidy this mess up, and the first folder I went for was Absolute Poker, and whaddya know? There was $70 just lying there, doing nothing! And now, here I am, 12 hours later, with an equally messy Windows Installation but a healthy profit in my Absolute roll.

I’ve been toying with the idea of returning to Absolute ever since the’ dust settled on the superuser scandal, but never got around to it. I probably haven’t played there for two years (which means the value of that $70 has rocketed in the interim!), principally because I hated the software, but it’s become a far more attractive prospect now that it’s reputation has been so publicly tarnished. And, coincidentally, today is the day that the new Absolute/Ultimate Bet network and software is rolled out. Lots of people on the site are complaining about the changes, but to my eyes it looks exactly the same as before – boxy, blue, and ugly.

Happily, the standard of tournament play is rock-bottom awful, at least at the limits that my measly bankroll allows me to play at. Put it this way – it’s bad enough to keep me away from the Badugi tables on Stars, and the standard of play has to be pretty damn poor to keep me away from the Badugi Goldmine. As for the software, if you can look beyond the boxiness, there’ splenty to recommend it. I’m particularly fond of the “Fold and Show” button, which is chronically overused by bad players who seem obsessed with giving away as much free information as possible. (I had a heads up battle with one player who would automatically minbet every street, and when raised, would fold and show their bluffs… I was so busy lauging that I ended up losing to them SAD FACE).

That aside, it’s now a fairly standard modern poker client; nothing’s massively broken, nothing’s particularly impressive. Game selection, OTOH, is massively varied. There’s good variant action, with a lot of busy Stud and Omaha ring games. Sadly, the NLHE is ENORMOUUSLY BROKEN, because of the effing Bad Beat Jackpot – it appears to be impossible to play NLHE ring on a standard table, because everybody’s playing in the larcenous Jackpot games, which get raked to buggery. Sod. That.

Tournament players are better served, with a nice selection of NLHE MTTs, and a blind structure that’s extremely friendly – the standard non-turbo seems to be 1500 chips, with 12 minute blinds, and the first hour goes 5/10, 10/20, 15/30, 20/40, 30/60. If anyone knows of a site with a gentler structure, please let me know where it is. STTs are also well spread; it’s not hard to find a NLHE game, and there’s plenty of Omaha games as well, and that’s where I’m currently spending my time.

So! Absolute’s alright. And oddly, today has been the first day in years where I’ve not seen someone claim that the site they’re playing on is rigged.

*edit* I lied – there are non Jackpot NLHE ring games. You just have to look bloody hard to find them. I should also mention the other upside of AP’s quest to lure players back; the ring games are deepstacked, with the max buy-in set at 200 BBs.

Yeah, yeah, it’s been a long time. I’ve been busy conquering the wonderful world of Badugi.

if you’re unfamilliar with Badugi, it works like this: -

It’s lowball draw poker, with three drawing rounds – just like 2-7 Triple Draw. Unlike 27TD, you get four hole cards. The objective is to make the lowest hand possible, with no shared suits. If you can draw a hand which contains four unpaired cards of different suits, you have a Badugi. If you have paired cards or shared suits, you don’t have a Badugi, and any Badugi will beat you, so Ad 2h 3s 3c will lose to Kd Qh Js Tc. If no-one has a Badugi, the best three card hand will win the pot.

It’s a lot of fun, in and of itself, but what makes it truly fantastic is that no-one knows how to play it. Literally, no-one. The game originated in Korea, (and is sometimes known as Korean poker), and although it’s been spread on a few other sites  (Doyle’s Room offers it, I believe), there’s an incredible lack of information about Badugi strategy on the internet, and some of the strategy articles up there are just plain wrong. This is particularly strange because it’s really not that complicated; once you’ve worked out the basic mechanics of the game, most plays are obvious and automatic. And yet! No-one else seems to have grasped the fundamentals yet, and I am cleaning up.

It’s the wild frontier of poker, or something. There are no books. There are no strategy articles on Full Tilt. It’s the levellest playing-field of all, and if you know what you’re doing, you have a HUGE edge. Currently, Stars are only spreading STTs and 50c/$1 limit ring games, and I’ve been focusing on the STTs; I have a ROI of over 130% across all limits, and better still, I’m showing up on the upper echelons of the weekly leaderboards for low-limit STTs (across all variants) on Stars, which is something I couldn’t get near to playing Hold’em. My best run of form was eleven straight STT cashes, playing $3.40 and $5.50 STTs. ELEVEN! Including six wins. I’ve also had a couple of bad streaks (it can be a punishing game, especially if you get a loose table where you can’t protect a made hand from five or six people drawing at you, which is all too common), but overall I’m running at 75% ITM, which is what scientists are calling pretty sick.

Of course, what with this being frontier poker, and with a fairly small pool of players on Stars, I’m not going to be offering any strategy advice on this blog just yet. After 100 STTs, I reckon I’ve encountered two, maybe three players who have any clue what they’re doing, and I’m quite happy with that situation currently. But I’ll say this – if you have any understanding of the mechanics of draw poker, sit down with a pen and paper and work out the odds on key propositions, such as catching a Badugi card with one draw to come, and the odds of improving a strong two card draw to a hand that can beat an opponent drawing one card (and they draw to all sorts of nonsense; the biggest school of fish are the players who’ll draw one to a Jack, or worse…).

Or… don’t. Leave me alone in my Badugi paradise, please. It’s a completely skill-free game, designed for luckbox chasers, and it’s probably rigged. Yeah, that’s exactly what it is…