What is Snowing?

Poker Variants / Marcus Bateman / 18 March 2011 / Leave a Comment

The term 'snowing' simply refers to a practice in draw poker low-ball games where you make a bluff based on the fact that you have a multiple number of important low cards in your hand, but ones that pair and actually make your hand very weak. However, despite the fact that your hand is very bad, due to the fact that you know where so many of the key cards for other lows are, your bluff stands a much larger chance of success, as other people will have a much harder time hitting their key cards.

Say you raise 2c3s5hKcKs in Deuce to Seven Triple draw and get a caller. You both discard two on first street, and you pick up another two high cards. The action goes check check, and your opponent discards two again, as do you. You pick up a two and a five. Your opponent checks.

Although this looks like a terrible spot for you, it's actually not a bad one to fire out with the intention of patting the final draw and firing at pretty much any river that your opponent draws at. They have shown themselves to be pretty weak, you now have two of the deuces so their draw may very well be a weak one anyway, and grabbing another five also means that even if they have improved to a one card draw, their chances of hitting it have substantially decreased with two fives out of circulation.

Even assuming they have improved to a OK hand like 3x4x7x8x, and against a fairly predictable opponent that will only call you down with any nine or better on the end, they still only have roughly a 30% chance of hitting a hand that can call on the river - more than enough odds to try and take this line with your big blockers and the tight calling range of the opponent.

In all forms of poker basing your bluffing around hands that have zero showdown value, terrible drawing potential and blockers to the opponent's likely hand is crucial to success, but perhaps nowhere more so than in low ball draw games like Badugi and Triple Draw.

Strong players win many more pots in these games in situations where weak players effectively give up, with the weak player resigning themselves to losing the hand without even thinking about the actual dynamics of the situation. Even just the odd successful bluff in limit poker pays for itself many times over due to how hard it is to price people out of pots with such rigid betting sizes, and setting up the odd well timed snow can add up to huge sums in the long run.

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