Brags. Beats. Battlestar Galactica.

As usual, there was some crazy action today at the CUPokS cash game, though this time we played dealer’s choice. Games ranged from the basic that are spread on Stars such as NLHE, PLO, stud, draw to more obscure variants such as PL 6-card Omaha Hi/lo with two boards known as ‘skinner’.

Skinner is a pretty crazy, high variance game, where it doesn’t seem like good players would have a very high edge on each other. The 2-board structure means it’s hard to bang out a huge hand on both flops and have a high equity, so it seems the game is about using your lock on certain quarters or halves to establish leverage and produce fold equity. Obviously this is similar to a regular split-pot game like PLO8, but it is even more pronounced here because it is very hard to have all four pots locked up in this game.

It seems pretty important to have A2 (much more so than in regular O8) in your hand in this game, in order to not leave yourself with non nut-lows on either board. A hand with A3 at best is a lot weaker in this, as A2 is much more common, while it is also much harder to make the nut low on both boards. Although, the rest of your hand is pretty significant, with the power of nut components to hit multiple nut hands being even greater.

A particularly big hand happened in a raised pot between Ben (one of the tough regs) and Seb (one of the weak players), where the boards read 236 and JT7xcc, and there was a bet and a raise on the flop. The turn came A and 9 respectively and the rest of the stacks poured in. Ben had both pots nutted up with 45KQxx, while Seb had flopped the nut straight on the second board with club redraws, A98xxxcc (he mistakenly mentioned that he had the nuts on the second board). Ben’s equity was huge here, freerolling and needing to dodge a club on the second board, and he ended up scooping. The hand was pretty sick because Ben needed something very specific to have both boards locked up and he did, although Seb was in pretty bad shape having no shot at one of the boards, just showing how important it is to get the money in with equity on both boards, each for high and low. I think Joe Tall’s concept in one of his split pot videos applies here, that you want to be the one starting the glass half-full and try to fill it up to the top.

Another game I wanted to mention was the Mississippi Stud games, which seem much more interesting as a non-gimmick game. The Mississippi Stud variant is the same as regular 7-card stud, except it is played NL, with 4th and 5th dealt simultaneously and the river card is face up. This seems like the only viable way to turn stud into an NL equivalent, and the game becomes much more interesting than regular Limit 7CS. The 4th/5th change is important to make speculative hands more playable, otherwise a big pair takes it down too often on 4th with a big bet. The river being face up makes for much more interesting river situations, because you don’t want the big river bets to turn into a total guessing game.

I heard about it from a 2+2 thread in the stud section, but a lot of stud regulars seemed to shoot it down because they probably felt insulted that the OP called straight stud a dying game. I tend to agree that stud isn’t that interesting, while I think Mississippi Stud creates quite interesting situations to analyse, mostly because it’s no limit. I think this game definitely has potential as a popular game as well, as it’s much more accessible to recreational players.

In the end, I learned a few things:
- Razz is boring, no matter what you try to do to it
- 5 card draw is even more boring and I’d rather die
- Do not 3-bet AK in LHE because you will miss a lot of flops (courtesy of Bobak)
- Bobak is like Isildur, everyone thought he was bad but he comes and stacks all the regs heads up
- Crazy games are not that fun, especially if it means getting it in a lot as a marginal favourite
- Any triple draw becomes way too slow live
- The games are good!