SCOOP Badugi and Heads Up Matches Recap

The Badugi tournament was interesting, but not profitable.

One of the things that is frustrating about badugi is that your hand doesn't often improve that often. In hold'em the best hand you can start with is one pair, and you only have two of the seven cards that go into making a showdown hand.

In Badugi if you have a playable hand it means you have 3/4 of or your entire showdown hand already. If you have A23 (the best possible draw) - let's say it's one club, one diamond, one heart - then the only cards that improve your hand are the 4-K of spades. That's only 10 cards out of the remaining 49 in the deck. Clearly starting out with a made 4 card hand is a huge advantage.

In the end I played for about 4 hours, but never got my starting stack of 5K over 7K. $162 out the window in that one.

I got much closer in the heads up matches. We started that tournament with 2,048 players. It takes 3 match wins to make the money and 11 to win the tournament. Somehow it seems like it shouldn't be that hard to only beat 11 guys.

In my first match my opponent was not great. I'd say under these conditions I could beat him 7 or 8 times out of 10. We went back and forth for a long time and while I was ahead almost the whole time it took 120 hands for me to finish him off. In the end he got his money in good with JJ against my 77, but I hit a 7 on the river to win the match.

In match #2 my opponent was much better. I'd say we were very evenly matched. After 82 hands we got it all in (I had him significantly covered) with a small pair for him and A9 for me. A nine came on the river and I was on to match #3.

Match #3 came to an end much quicker. About 10 hands in I got dealt AKs. He raised, I reraised, he popped it again and I put him all in. He called me with 88 and I missed. I still had 1,000 chips to his 9,000 and actually got it back to 2,500 when I got it all in with AJ vs 55. If I win that pot we are back to even. Instead I was out the door, just short of the money.

After 13 tournaments in the FTOPS and SCOOP my $7,500 bankroll is at $6,183.