Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving :)

After Sunday, I took another break this week for obvious holiday-related reasons - well, that, and too many good videogames have come out lately. So, today, I wanted to play some poker, spent 2 hours at the 20/40 razz tables on FTP and made 2K. Razz is remarkably easy when you run hot and play better than them; why aren't tournaments more like razz, especially in terms of running hot? :(

I always hate writing about this game because a)I don't know who's reading this, and b)there's so little in print about it that any tidbit of information I release is bound to wind up improving someone's game a little too much. The last time I wrote a couple of posts on a particular subcategory of poker, I singlehandedly made it several times harder over the course of the next year; it's still possible to crush satellites more than any other type of MTT, but nobody's as terrible as they used to be. On the other hand, razz makes for some incredibly easy examples of good hand reading/poker (just ask Sklansky, who uses it in every single book he's ever written) and might also be the most profitable midstakes game available online. (Hell, it might be the most profitable high limit game, too. There are a half dozen 200/400 regulars on FTP, and I know for a fact at least two of them are pretty bad. If I was a shade better and/or properly bankrolled...)

Why is everyone so bad? Very briefly, it's because the aggression revolution that transformed poker since '04 hasn't made it to razz yet, and the one book on it - Sklansky on Poker - is pretty much the most misinterpreted poker book on the market, with everyone involved taking its contents in the most weak/tight light possible. Yes, Sklansky says to call lots of good hands on third instead of raising in order to exploit your edge on fifth and later...but he doesn't say to play passively, and taking that the wrong way makes people give away pot after pot after pot. I would love to go into more detail, because third street in razz is probably the worst played and least understood street in any card game with multiple betting rounds, but somebody's going to have to pay me to write a book in order for that to happen. It's too valuable.

So why is the title of this blog post 'tournaments are silly' when it's pretty much a tease about a game no one plays? It's because donkaments and razz have one thing in common: almost nobody playing either them 'gets' poker. Don't get me wrong - a number of the FTP regs are pretty decent at razz, and the top MTT pros are very good at MTT's. But very few of those people who do not also play cash games understand poker as a whole. They don't make thin value bets, don't understand pot odds except in the context of their game(s), think that 'waiting for a better spot' means giving away pot after pot after pot...it goes on. Even on Cardrunners, people don't really understand that when you're getting 1.4:1 on a call when you're a small favorite against someone's 8xBB pushing range, the result is not a 'thin' call and it's got nothing to do with 'calling an all in with A4' or whatever. IMO, in order to 'get' poker, you have to intuitively understand just what your edges are and how to take them, and very few people not playing NL cash/nosebleed limit/HS PLO really grok any of that.

A pretty basic razz concept that gets my point across: as I said, Sklansky says that it's worth just calling a nice hand instead of reraising on third if it makes the other guy play bad on fourth (by calling too much in a small pot), and worth doing the same thing on fourth if it makes them play bad on fifth. But wait - what do people do really, really badly in razz? They take lots of cards off as way too giant dogs on big bet streets. So, how do you exploit that? Well, you can either give away a large number of small pots on fourth to press your edge in a now medium pot on fifth...or...you can bloat pots on third with the best hand, get to fifth as - most likely - a big equity favorite, and then get them to call as a big dog over and over again because "the pot is large". This is what Sklansky actually does say to do (just not in so many words), but his advice hasn't been followed, because the people playing the game refuse to raise without the nuts. Their mentality is the same as the people refusing to make pot odds calls on CR, and it likely just kills their results.

BTW, I don't claim to murder those games playing this way, but I'm not even that good at razz - just poker - and I'm already a slight to decent winner at the highest razz games below nosebleed. I hear I'm also supposed to be pretty good at donkaments, but they're silly. Still, I plan on winning a couple of them at the Bellagio next month.

Until then I'll probably just play a bunch of razz and Sundayments.

Good post. I would like some more info on crushing sats. Thanks.

Time to dust off Sklansky on Poker and have a look at razz, obv. Just curious, too...do you ever see it spread live?

And how about a post of the satellite strategy piece, for those of us who missed it elsewhere? If we can post Bond18's tournament series, no reason we can't reprint an Adanthar classic, right?

You are correct on weak tight play, not understanding odds and bad play in general at razz. When razz mtt questions pop up on 2+2 I find myself laughing because of peoples lack of understanding of mtt skills and how you need to accumulate a big stack. Usually I agree with your analysis and sometimes find myself posting an agreement. Usually I see the responces and just shake my head.

The observation of the lack of aggreession in razz is dead on. Most of the razz that I see, be it an mtt or cash, is bet/call with very few raises ever thrown into the mix. I am always surprised when people who had me dominated all the way but just call on every street turn over the nuts.