Card Player TV

Heads Up With Jason Mercier

With more than $5 million in tournament winnings, poker pro Jason Mercier has made quite a name for himself on the tournament circuit. Mercier also plays in a lot of the cash games; here, he provides an overview of two new poker games that are gaining in popularity.

Card Player TV: Can you explain a little bit about the variations of badugi — badeucey and badacey?

Jason Mercier: Well, badeucey is a triple-draw, split-pot game, with half going to the best badugi hand and half going to the best deuce-to-seven lowball hand. So, a very good hand is 2-3-4-5-7, with 2-3-4-5 of different suits.

CPTV: But, obviously, that hand doesn’t come very often, so what are the more realistic hands?

JM: You want to play deuce-to-seven types of hands; a good starting hand, for example, is 2-3-4 of different suits. If nobody has a badugi — a four-card hand with four unpaired, unsuited cards — the best three-card badugi takes the badugi side of the pot. You can’t scoop the pot unless you have the best of both; it’s not like Omaha eight-or-better, in which sometimes the high side wins the whole pot.

CPTV: And what is badacey?

JM: Badacey is the exact same thing from the badugi side, except that you are playing ace-to-five lowball instead of deuce-to-seven. So, the very best hand is A-2-3-4-5, with A-2-3-4 of different suits. It’s very similar.

All Inbox With Jean-Robert Bellande

In Card Player TV’s show All Inbox, fans can get advice from the world’s most successful poker pros by sending their questions to [email protected]. In this edition, Jean-Robert Bellande answers a question regarding the game that most players play the worst.

Steve M., Oklahoma: What game, in your opinion, do people generally play the worst, or what game is usually the softest?

Jean-Robert Bellande: Well, for a long time, deuce-to-seven lowball was my road game, because very few people knew how to play it. But now, there is so much information about deuce-to-seven online that there are a lot of really good players, and anyone can play well. To answer the question, you need a game about which there is not that much information out there, and for me, that game is badugi. It’s a game that not too many people have heard of, but I love it. I enjoy it not only because it’s good fun, but because a lot of people just don’t know what they’re doing; they don’t have the math down. We also invented some other games over the past few years, badeucey and badacey, which so many people have never heard of and are now becoming popular. There is no book on these games, no information. So, if you can sort out how to play, and know the optimal cards to draw and choose from, you can have a big edge before everybody learns how to play. Right now, everybody knows how to play hold’em, but for the most part, nobody knows how to play these new games. So, if you want to have an edge, figure out a new game and master it.