469 Super Razz Deucey

Folds?

This is a huge ante game, hero should never be folding. The only question is calling vs raising. With everyone else having a face card up, I see no need to raise, as they are all likely folding anyway. If somebody else had a 9 or lower up, then you should raise to help motivate them to fold. These are massive antes, and a large bring-in, for what appears to be a 50-100 limit game. A lot of the play is about getting others to fold their equity on these early streets, and thus increase your own equity. Heck, we could argue to raise for value here, as the 5 who completed doesn't have to have much underneath to go for a pure steal with only one other low card face up.

oh wow i didn't realize size of ante till i re-read action again lol

yeah don't fold, think fossilman's post is A+

Yep, I would be tempted to raise to deny pot odds to potential droolers with high up cards.

btw this brings up a question or two for me: how would you go about estimating equity in this particular spot vs

A. opp's range that includes steals
B. opp's range that is only legit, like a rainbow 3c9 and lower?

and also given the ante structure, and let's say your 8 or better badugi-making low cards are max live (2/3/5/7/8 in this case) but you have like say, a 2, 3, and 5 behind you potentially raising and causing mayhem, are you still wanting to flat here, all things considered?

If I have a bunch of low cards behind me, this spot becomes 100% fold or raise. Even one more low card behind me, I think it's fold or raise. So much of the game becomes denying equity by getting people to fold, when the antes are so large. This game is going to have massive variance if many of the players are competent or better. And tons of frustration that can easily put you on tilt, when you start out with a great hand, are up against other players with mediocre hands at best, but then you catch several bricks.

Whether you pick raise or fold depends upon so many factors, its hard to get into it here. If you make it 2 bets, will the players behind you with good hands always 3- and 4-bet, and you'll be putting in the cap here? If yes, then probably fold your 9 draw. If instead they will just call, even with their stronger hands, then lean towards raising, since you won't get punished as badly when you run into a couple of better hands. Also be more inclined to fold if the others are playing fairly well, and more inclined to raise if several of them will play poorly. And several other factors. LOL, it depends!

the one sentence about going on tilt described the super razzdeucey experience perfectly for me lol. thanks for the detailed reply, btw!

suppose one really relevant question that comes to mind for me - if we reverted this to a normal quarter-ante structure, are you still approaching this exact spot the same way? my expectation is that there's so much less to fight for that we just wouldn't want to bother with the 3c9 (particularly with the 9 showing) and we should just stick to doing more nitty pre-stuff, given the 5-card/discard structure of it all.

If this were 10 ante, 15 bring-in, 50-100 limits, we could fold this hand. It might be a small mistake to do so, but definitely not a big mistake. In the original hand, he had (49)6, which I would definitely play. But if it had been (46)9, a fold is definitely looking a lot better. Likewise, if it wasn't all face cards behind, but there was one or more low cards up, a fold is definitely looking better.

In all stud games, the size of the antes and bring-in make a massive difference in starting hand selection.

thanks for elaborating! makes a good bit of sense and certainly helps contextualize/confirm some of my own ideas

This is much less likely in the "super" version of the game being played here. It's much harder for him not to have decent hole cards when he has 4 to choose from.