Getting Them to Break in Lowball

When you have four to a flush (and no pair) on the turn in hold'em, all you can end up with on the river is a flush (or a pair); you can't end up with, for example, trips or a full house. You can do nothing to change what hand you end up with.

When you have four to an 8 in razz or seven-card stud high-low with one to come, the best you can end up with for low is an 8. You can't make a 7 or better.

You can, of course, influence the outcome by betting in such a way as to control how many players stay till the end, and thus modify your chances of winning. But that's all you can do. You will always make that flush approximately one-fifth of the time in the hold'em example. No matter how many opponents you have, you will always end up with the same predetermined hand on the river. You will always make the 8 (and no better) approximately one-third of the time (depending on what cards are in the other players' boards).

But, lowball; ah, that's different. Lowball and draw are the only poker games in which you can influence the outcome by more than just the bets. You can also control, to a certain extent, the hand you end up with. In lowball, you can change a hand that is doomed to lose into one that wins by the number of cards you draw. The same principle applies in draw poker, but to a somewhat lesser extent. I'll talk about draw another time.

In lowball, you can also change your expectation from negative to positive by modifying the draw. Here's an example:

In a Northern California $20 single-limit game, I open from a middle position with A-2-3-joker-K. I have the best one-card-draw hand in lowball. Everyone folds to the big blind, Fearful Freddy, who raises. Here's what I know about Freddy. He's a fairly tight player, and also very timid in his play. He never raises on the come, because he's afraid of being reraised. So, even if he has a wheel draw in the big blind, he just calls. He raises only with pat hands. He does not consider a straight 9 to be a pat hand in that position, again because he is too vulnerable to a reraise. If he has a rough pat 10, he breaks it and draws two cards. If he has a straight 9, he calls, raps pat, and hopes for the best. If the player who opened also stands pat, he checks and folds to a bet, and undoubtedly inwardly congratulates himself for not having lost three bets on the hand.

Of course, when he merely calls and then stands pat, I stand pat right behind him, no matter what I have. Even if I have the aforementioned wonderful hand, I stand pat. Yes, if I draw, he will check and then call my bet, but why settle for a bit more than 50 percent of $70 when I can guarantee myself 100 percent of $50? That, by the way, is a way I choose to modify the outcome of my hand by the draw. In this case, while I have a very good chance of beating the other player by drawing, I choose not to take that chance. If he calls me, I have, of course, no chance of winning, but I know the chance of his calling is very, very slight. And I reinforce it sometimes after he folds by saying something like, "Man, this hand deserved a better fate," implying that I had a very good pat hand and would have been thrilled to see a raise. As it happens, I would have been thrilled, but not for the reason Freddy thinks.

This much more I know about Freddy: He raises in the given situation with any pat hand 8 or better. He also gives it one tentative raise with a "breaking" 9. That is, if his hand is 9-7 or smoother, he raises, and if reraised, he breaks (throws away the 9 rather than stand on the 9-high pat hand) and draws a card. If he has any kind of 8, he does not break; neither does he reraise. If he has a very smooth 7, he might reraise; with a rough 7, he just calls. Freddy rarely bets eights after the draw. In a raised pot, if his opponent takes one card, he always checks. So, you know what he has if he bets. He does bet a smooth 8 into a two-card draw, and then if raised, he calls, because the pot has become "too big to fold." He bluffs so seldom that you can discount that completely. The only time I've seen him bluff is if his opponent takes three cards, and even then he rarely bets pairs. For him, a bluff in that spot is to bet a king or queen, which by some would be considered almost a value bet.

Anyway, here I've opened with that wonderful one-card draw, and Freddy has raised. Naturally, I reraise. Freddy looks pained and calls. When the dealer requests how many cards he wants, Freddy shows the 9, says, "This is no good," and asks for one. When it gets to me, if I say anything, it's something like, "You're breaking a 9? I'll break mine, also." Technically, that's not even a lie. Most of the time, I say nothing. I know Freddy is sure he did the right thing. He doesn't want to be sitting with a pat 9 in a big pot. It doesn't occur to him that what I did was change a situation in which I had the worst of it to one in which I had the best of it. Let's look at the math.

If I just call Freddy's raise, Freddy stands pat, and I'm drawing to beat a 9 in a pot that contains $50. He will always check and will always call my bet. Either I lose $40 (two bets) or win $50 (only if I catch a 9, because then I won't bet) or $70 (Freddy's two bets before the draw, his call after it, and the dealer blind and small blind). Let's say his hand is 9-7-6-3-2. If I catch any 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8, I win $70. Out of 43 unseen cards, 18 times (he has two of the cards that make my hand) I win $70 and three times (when I catch a 9) I win $50; 22 times I lose $40. So, [(18 x $70 = $1,260) + (3 x $50 = $150) = $1,410] – (22 x $40 = $880) = $530. That averages out to $12.33 ($530 divided by 43 times) per hand – not bad.

If I reraise, though, Freddy draws a card. In the contest of 7-6-3-2 vs. my joker-wheel draw, my win rate is about 62.6-to-37.4. There will be a bet after the draw more than 50 percent of the time. Let's be conservative and say it's half the time. I will win those at a greater rate than the 62.6-to-37.4 because of Freddy's play. That is, when he bets, I know he has a 7 or better, and I won't call with an 8 or worse. Also, some of the times when he checks, I will pair and bet, and win. Also, some of the times when he bets, I will raise (with a smooth 7 or better), and make one more bet. So, even though I call the average bet after the draw $10, it's probably more like $12 to $15. I either win $100 (four bets plus the blinds plus that average after-the-draw bet) or lose $90. Thus, [(62.6 x $100 = $6,260) – (37.4 x $90 = $3,366) = $2,894, or an average gain of $28.94 per hand. That's almost two and a half times as much as playing it the other way.

Let's also see what Freddy lost by changing his draw. When he stood pat on his 9-7, he was a 51.3-to-48.7 favorite. When he drew, we saw that he was a 62.6-to-37.4 underdog. He went from being a slight favorite to being a considerable underdog.

Nick Thorn, who is basically a pretty sharp player, does not understand this. He is gambling-averse, and reraising to draw cards is gambling. He doesn't want to take a chance of Freddy having a hand and going one more bet, and then probably losing four bets on a hand with which he could have got away for two bets, and with which he would make three bets when he hit the hand.

Good lowball players know all about this play, and you see it all the time in high-stakes games. Sometimes you see players go five bets or more before one of them quits. Some of these players overuse the play, though, and it hurts them. If a player always puts in extra bets when drawing to a good hand, he's raising on the come as much as three-fourths of the time. A counter to this play is to reraise when you're drawing to a good hand or when you have a pat 9 or better. Another counter is merely to call with any pat hand, and check it after the draw. You see both in high-stakes games, and the very best players mix up their play. A good mix, which won't give away to an opponent what you are doing, is to go extra bets maybe only one-third to half the time you are drawing. That way, an opponent doesn't know what hand to put you on and can't play percentages to make his decisions. Of course, advanced players also know that this tactic of reraising when you're drawing works best when you're second to draw. If you put five bets in and finally get the other guy to quit drawing, but you're first to draw with a hand to which you were drawing all the time, the opponent can stand on a 9 and doesn't have to agonize over whether to break it.

Here's a situation in which I changed a guaranteed loser into a winner: In a $1-$1-$2 (three traveling blinds of $1, $1, and $2, with a $4 minimum opening bet) no-limit lowball game, a player had put in a re-entry blind from the cutoff seat. To get dealt in, a player who had missed the blinds had to put up twice the size of the big blind, which gave him last action before the draw and also doubled the minimum opening bet for that one hand to $8. This is not the same as posting in flop games. I was to the right of that player. No one had opened. My hand was 8-4-2-2-joker, a one-card draw to an 8. That was a good opening hand from my position. I would not have opened with that hand from an early position. I opened for the minimum, $8.

The action temporarily skipped the overblinder. The dealer folded. Clara, in the small blind, called. The big blind folded, and the overblinder looked at his cards in disgust, pulled three kings out, and dumped the cards.

The house dealer asked for cards. Clara, who was first to draw, stood pat.

Here's what I knew about Clara: She liked to be tricky. She frequently did not play a hand straightforwardly, trying to trap others. My stack was deep, and so was hers. She had about $300 in chips and I had $500. If she had an 8 or a rough 7, she probably would have raised here. In no-limit lowball, you want to protect a hand like that, and not give others a free draw. She would have raised somewhere between $20 and $30, and might have been prepared to fold for a big reraise. A hand like that is much more vulnerable in a no-limit game than in a limit game. But she was pat. With what? Not a rough 9 or worse. She would have hemmed and hawed and looked like she wanted to raise, but would have been trying to trap others if she had a hand like that. More likely, though, she would not even have played it. Her not raising showed extreme weakness, and it would be easy to rob someone who played the hand that weakly. She could hardly make a large bet after the draw, and if she bet small or checked, she would have to think about a huge bet. She would not want to risk her whole stack on such a weak hand. No, she had to have a monster, and was trying to trap one of the remaining players. There were two who could have acted, the big blind and the overblinder. If either of them raised, ah, she had caught them in her trap. If neither raised, well, anyone might be fooled into thinking her lack of a raise indicated weakness. She would bet small after the draw, tempting a raise, and then pounce.

I had the choice of drawing one card or two. I would not have opened the pot with a two-card draw. I had planned on drawing one when I opened. But I was pretty sure that if I drew one, I would be drawing dead. The situation had changed. I now had to go for the long shot. I asked the dealer for two cards.

My first card was a 3. I would have made the 8. As I expected, Clara bet $15 after the draw, less than half the size of the pot. She was still trapping. My second card was a 5, giving me a wheel. I raised $40, which was not too much. I knew she had a big hand, and wanted her to trap herself. She reraised $100, and I put her all in.

I showed my wheel, and she showed the 6-4 she had tried to get cute with. If she had raised about $20, I likely would have drawn one card instead of two. She would have bet more after the draw, but probably only about half the pot, so maybe $30. The difference was huge. Instead of losing $300, she would have made more than $60, a difference of more than $360.

I had changed the outcome by changing my draw. If you draw to an 8, the best you can end up with is an 8. If you draw more cards, you can end up with a better hand. Of course, you decrease your chance of making a good hand – and drawing two cards against a one-card draw would almost always be a mistake – but you can change your chance of winning a pot from zero to something greater than zero, with the concomitant chance of winning a lot of money.

Had it been a limit game, by the way, I would not have drawn two cards. The object of no-limit is to give yourself a chance to win a big pot, even sometimes at the expense of taking the worst of it. But in limit, she might not have played it tricky. She would have raised and I would have called, or she still might have tried to play it tricky and not raised. But in either case, I would have drawn one card, and lost either $24 or $32.