Greatest Games You’ve Never Heard Of: Drawmaha

There is a Spectre haunting the card table. After a decade and a half of all hold’em all the time, the general poker populace is finding the game increasingly to be a strain. In part this is because, for a new player breaking in, or even the casual regular, there are a huge number of fantastically sophisticated players to catch-up with before you start to compete at even relatively low online levels. If you play live at your local poker room, there is the grind of TAG-gy poker against eleven limpers on a ten handed table. Six hands an hour and all of them rags, and that’s only if no one falls asleep over their chip stacks. Even tournament hold’em is getting tiresome – there are only so many A-K vs. 9-9 preflop all-ins you can watch before the barrel of your grandfather’s hunting rifle starts to look like the easy way out.

ESPN have reflected on their increasingly non-hold’em coverage of the World Series Of Poker over the last few years. You can watch every single final table live streamed, even the no limit nine-card badugi hold’em hi-med-lo split, or whatever. PokerStars too have begun to offer a wider and wider range of games: 8-game mixes, four or five types of draw, three types of stud, five card Omaha, courchevel, badugi, all in a wide range of structures, cash and tournament.

And so when a new variant arises that works, it’s something worth celebrating. For example, Drawmaha, also called Sviten Special, features at the Cash Game Festivals in Europe this year. Sviten Special is a glorious monster made from the reanimated body parts of five-card Omaha, split-pot games, and draw poker, and it is hella fun.

The Rules

The set-up is the same as for your usual hold’em/Omaha games, limit or no-limit as preferred; blinds are posted and then five cards are dealt to each player face down as hole cards.

There is then a round of betting followed by a flop – dealt without a burn card (depending on the number of players and how many cards they draw, the game can be very card thirsty, the lack of burn cards reduces the need to reshuffle and reuse the discards). There is a round of betting on the flop, and then each player has the option to draw zero to five cards.

Should a player draw only one card then the “One Open” rule is triggered. The player is dealt one card face up and may then decide whether to continue playing with the open card which everyone has seen, or discard it and draw another, this time face down.

With the draw completed the game continues with a turn card and betting round, then a final river card and betting round.

At the showdown the pot is then split. One half goes to the best Omaha hand made up of two cards from the hole and three from the board. The other half goes to the best five card draw hand using only the players’ hole cards.

Starting Hands

With more ways to win half the pot, five hole cards, and a an extra betting round, Drawmaha plays super big. There should be a focus on hands that have a good chance of making the nuts. There are also fewer scooping hands because hands like flushes and full houses in the draw hand contain many of the outs for the kind of hands you would be looking to hit with the Omaha hand. So bear that in mind when it comes to hand selection.

Like most split pot games, the best hands are those that offer you the chance of scooping the pot. So a straight in the draw hand plays very well having the potential to hit a massive wrap draw for the Omaha-hand. The higher the straight the better, and if you’re suited or double-suited, all the better.

High two pairs with straighty kickers – like A-A-K-K-10 – are also strong, giving you plenty of scoopable flops to hit. Again suitedness is a plus.

After scooping hands, look for good draw hands, two pair no kicker, trips, and made hands better than a ten are often good for the draw pot, but give you way less chance of hitting big with an Omaha hand. Play accordingly and aim for multiway pots unless you have a good reason for thinking your naked pair is good for the Omaha half of the pot.

Strong Omaha hands such as loosely connected high-cards are then in the third tier of hands. They still play alright, but are much less likely to scoop the whole pot. Even less than strong draw-hands. It may still be worth playing strong Omaha hands in position or in multiway pots, but use caution.

Hand Reading

The really interesting part of the game, as compared to straight Omaha, is the huge amount of extra information you get from the draw. As with regular draw, what people hold will dictate how many cards they take. So track who draws how many carefully, that will be key to putting them on a range.

One card draws for example are likely to be two pair or a straight/flush/straight-flush draw. Two cards is suggestive of trips or else a pair with a high kicker. Three card draws leaves a pair in the hand most likely, and drawing four indicates a probable Ace. If they draw five, they are the kind of player you want to keep at your table for as long as their accountant will let them. They may just hate money or be one of those crazy Russian degens that you read about.

These general reads can be adjusted based on the texture of the flop. For example, a four card draw on a 9-9-7 flop is likely to indicate a range which includes the two remaining nines, possibly a seven, as well as the four aces. Drawing three on a three spade flop may well be a case of someone holding on to a couple of their spades and hoping to just get lucky with the other three cards.

Aggression

Some players will only play big pots for the scoop. If you can identify them, then you can afford to ramp up the aggression with your own one-way hands when in a pot with them. Especially if you’ve got half the pot locked-up. Sure, you may end up splitting the pot, but the pay-off from scooping the pot with the Omaha nuts, because you shut out all the draw hands, can be well worth it.

Remember that the additional betting round and the profusion of chances for draws to improve means that the pot you scoop is potentially much bigger.

That’s our intro to Drawmaha. Anyone thinking of getting Sviten Special into regular rotation in their home games? If you give it a go, let us know how it went in the comments below.