Assuming that you’re in the clear about Badugi Rules, basic strategy and starting hand selection, I’ll try to cover a few of the peculiarities of the PL betting structure for this game. For live action, you’ll have to be able to calculate a pot size bet within seconds. This takes a little bit of practice, but at the end of the day, it’s not rocket science. In online Pot Limit Badugi, you don’t need to do any sort of calculus at all: the poker software will do it for you. If you want to brush up on your understanding of the PL betting mechanism, take a look at some of the articles already published on this site.
What you need to understand about PL play is that as far as dynamics go, it’s somewhere between FL and NL. Fixed limit poker is mainly a pot odds based game. In NL, where your reading skills are fully rewarded, you get a primarily implied-odds based game. PL sees a reduction in the importance of pot odds as well as a reduction in the significance of read-based implied odds play. I’d say PL is between FL and NL, but obviously closer to the latter.
Pot control is quite probably the most important concept in PL Badugi. Making money in all forms of poker is based on exploiting the mistakes your opponents make. Through proper pot control, you’re denying your opponents the possibility of compensating for their pot odds mistakes through the implied odds. As far as pot control goes, you should understand this: a small bet in PL can lead to an exponentially escalating minimum bet, which means that a small move which occurs early in the hand can have much-increased repercussions on later streets. By not firing out that small bet early on, you can pretty much make certain that the pot remains a reasonably sized one. Let’s consider the following example: on one street (any street) of a hand, there is $10 in the pot. You’re faced with the decision of checking or betting. You check, and your opponent fires out a pot sized bet. It now costs you $10 to see another card. If you decide to fire out a $5 bet instead of checking, you give your opponent the possibility to fire a $25 bet into you, and thus you increase the cost of the card you want to see by 150%. This example depicts the importance of a small early bet perfectly. This takes us to another extremely important PL concept: the opening of the gate.
As you can see in the above example, your small bet opens up the gates for the flood. If your opponent does fire out that $25 bet, you’ll be able to escalate the hostilities to the point of shoving all-in shortly. The opening of the gates is an important part of PL Badugi pot control. In NL poker, you can maximize the size of the pot in a variety of ways when you’re holding a monster. Heck, you can shove all-in anytime, and the pot doesn’t really get any bigger than that… In PL poker, your options are somewhat limited. If you know what you’re doing though, through a small early bet, you can set the scene for an eventual all-in later on. Beware however: the opening of the gates works both ways and the last thing you want is to subtly open it up only to find that you cannot handle what you find on the other side.
PL games tend to generate more poker rake than NL ones, and that’s probably due to the fact that more hands are played on average at PL tables, as players find it somewhat more difficult to wreck their entire bankrolls within a few hands. Signing up for a rakeback deal can usually make short work of that spike in poker rake.
Author Resource:-
Steve Larson, an online poker player from Canada, visit his poker forum site for more info.
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