Wild card games part one - stakes and games

Marcus Bateman / Marcus Bateman / 12 January 2009 / Leave a Comment

We've all been there, you are sitting with friends or family, someone pulls out the chips and you start up a low stakes poker game. Sooner or later talks of adding extra game comes along, and before you know it you are playing stud hi lo with one eyed jacks, deuces and threes all wild, and you need a straight flush just to even call.

Although these games can be great fun, you can often see a lot of heartbreak in these games if you are not careful, particularly if you let the stakes rise quickly or the games get more and more bizarre.

A good example of this was in a three handed dealers choice game I played with two friends a year ago. We were playing a bizarre mix of games, but mostly sticking to pot limit Omaha with the jokers included in the deck as wild cards. One of my friends said on his deal that he wanted to play pot limit Omaha but that you could use any number of cards from your hand to make your final hand (usually in pot limit Omaha you have to use exactly two of the cards to make your final hand). I did not hear this remark, and in cases where no comment was made it was assumed the same variation as the hand played before would be continued (which had just been regular PLO with jokers).

Suffice to say that I picked up a hand that would have been very strong assuming we were just playing Omaha with wild jacks, but was extremely weak in a game where someone can play any number of cards from their hand (as they could easily just have quads or trips and make a full house or quads from nowhere). I hit the nut flush on a non paired board (which would have been at worst a split pot in the variation I thought we were playing), but my friend had quad queens with three in his hand and one on the board, we got it in, and I lost a massive pot.

A big argument ensued, as it was obvious to everyone that I quite clearly did not hear the new variation we were playing from how I played the hand, and the player not in the pot argued we should just split the pot, while my opponent argued that it was my problem and he won fair and square. In the end we did split the pot, although not after creating a pretty bad atmosphere over what before had been just a fun home game.

The moral of this is that although it is great to play bizarre variants of poker, if you are playing them for meaningful stakes you have to be extremely clear each time the games or betting limits change. This never seems important when the game is flowing smoothly, but all it takes is one slip up in a big pot and you can immediately create a massive problem. This is especially true in games with people that you do not know that well - the lack of trust can often create tension - and as a result problems can often kick off very quickly.

In my experience the best way to deal with these sort of problems before they come up is to elect an arbitrator at the start of the game (either the most experienced player or the owner of the location you are playing in), whose decision is final in any dispute. Although they may not make the right choice, they will at least make a choice, which will make the game get back to smooth running as soon as possible.

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Wild card games part two - strategy - Marcus Bateman