Brief flirtation with Razz

I was a little bit bored last night, and logged onto a Razz play money table to see if I could figure out what was going on. Razz is apparently a low-hand version of Stud. While I’ve never played anything except Holdem, I think I managed to figure out the basics, tripling my play money in the process.

Of course, I can’t really use a play money table to gauge how I’m doing so I went looking for some real money Razz games I could play. Wasn’t much at that time of day except an empty $1+20c Sit & Go, so I enrolled myself in that and waited a bit. I was just about to unregister myself and go to bed when the table filled up!

I managed to muddle through. I don’t really know how to calculate the odds of making a hand exactly, so was just working from gut feel mostly, I bluffed a bit when I had something low showing but something not so great in the hole. Seemed to work well enough to get me into the final two. The chip leader and I swapped chips around for about 10 minutes until I eventually went all in with something like 357. 4th street was a 2, and he had 85 showing so I pushed and we ended up all in. I caught a QKJ and he took the pot, leaving me in 2nd place with $2.40, double my buy in.

Obviously, a single Sit & Go doesn’t tell me anything about my ability/affinity for Razz, but I quite enjoyed it, and I think it’s something I’ll eventually come back to. For now though, I think I’ll mostly stick with Holdem.