Badugi

Four cards, three draws, lowball. Go for four low cards in four different suits. 2–8 players.

Who To Play With

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How to play Badugi

  1. 1A lowball draw game from Korea: four cards each, three chances to swap, and the lowest hand of four different suits wins.
  2. 2Your hand is the biggest group of your cards with no two of the same suit and no two of the same rank. Four cards like that make a badugi, which beats any three-card hand; three cards beat any two, and two beat one. Aces are low and straights don't count.
  3. 3Between hands of the same size, the lower one wins: compare the highest cards first, then the next. So A-2-3-4 in four suits is the best hand of all, and K-Q-J-10 is the worst badugi (but still beats every three-card hand).
  4. 4Everyone puts in an ante and gets four private cards, then there's a round of betting starting left of the dealer. Then come three draws, each followed by a betting round: on a draw you may throw away any number of cards and get new ones, or stand pat. Everyone sees how many cards each player swapped.
  5. 5This is fixed limit: every bet and raise is exactly one unit, and each betting round allows a bet and up to 3 raises. The first two rounds use the small bet and the last two the big bet, twice as much. At the first stakes that's an ante of 10 and bets of 20/40.
  6. 6After the last betting round, everyone still in shows their cards and the best badugi hand wins the pot.
  7. 7Play chips only — never real money. Everyone starts with 1000 chips; run out and you're out of the game.
  8. 8To keep games a sensible length, the stakes rise every 5 hands and the game ends after 50 hands (or as soon as one player has every chip). Most chips wins.
  9. 9If you're all in, you can only win as much from each opponent as you put in; the rest goes to side pots that the others play for.
  10. 10At a showdown everyone still in shows their hand. Equal hands split the pot.

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