A Slave to Variance

There’s a good post about playing high pairs in stud/8 at the 2+2 magazine.  It illustrates a few common scenarios that you might face when you are heads up with a big pair versus someone going low.  The basic conclusion is a bit muddied in the article, but can be summarized as follows:

Big pairs get crushed when a single low opponent - with no high draws -  catches well on fourth (and fifth).

While a big pair still has an equity edge on 4th street if the low catches, that edge is tiny unless the big pair has not caught a second pair.  The big problem is that if the low draw doesn’t brick on 5th the big pair is now caught in a reverse implied odds situation where while they have equity to show the hand down they will be giving up $ on every street from 5th-7th.  And this is about as good as it gets for big pairs.  If the low draw has as much as a gutshot, ace high, or two backdoor draws for high, the big pair has less than 50% equity.

On that note, this week I will begin working on a version of PokerStove which can handle stud and stud/8 so as to better estimate equity evaluation in those games.