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A-5 Triple Draw Strategy
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Strategies For Ace To Five Triple Draw
With the rising popularity of A-5 Triple Draw on some of the busiest poker sites around, many players are diving in to take advantage of new players that don’t yet have a firm grasp of the game’s fundamentals. To level the playing field a little, here are 5 tips that should help you win more chips and avoid busting out. Check out this article on 2-7 Triple Draw strategy for more information on this other triple draw variant. 2-7 Triple Draw is very similar to A-5. Both of these games are closely related to 27 Single Draw. Position is Everything in a-5 triple draw
The positions in A-5 Triple Draw come into play during the betting rounds. In early positions you have many players left to act behind you, any one of whom can just call, raise or re-raise after you’ve bet… you won’t know until they do it. So in general you want to only play very strong hands from early positions, especially first position; if you limp in with a weak hand and someone behind you raises, you’re either a fool to call or you’ve just wasted chips by folding. Either way, it’s bad.
In contrast, the late positions give you enormous control over the table action regardless of your cards, the last position being the best of all. From here you can: a) bluff early limpers off their hands, b) limp in with a marginal hand if the action is cheap enough, and c) you can get out of the way if the action gets too hot before you’ve committed any chips to the pot. In 2013 you can play A-5 Triple Draw at Pokerstars, Betsharks Poker and Full Tilt Poker. We offer exclusive poker bonuses at each of these US poker rooms.
Reading Your Hand in a5 triple Draw poker
A-5 Triple draw is perhaps the easiest of all poker games when it comes to hand selection. The best hand is A-2-3-4-5… simple. It doesn’t matter that it’s a straight; it doesn’t matter if they’re all suited. You want the lowest pip count, period. The next best hand would be A-2-3-4-6, then A-2-3-5-6, A-2-4-5-6 and A-3-4-5-6 and so on. These hands listed here are considered the premium hands, the strongest hands in the deck, and you’d never, ever fold these.
Since the winning hand is determined from the highest card down (7-5-4-3-2 beats 7-6-3-2-1) more emphasis should be placed on the highest three cards than on the bottom two. This breaks with most other strategies that insist you have an Ace in your hand. But as you can see in the example, the bottom two cards don’t even come into play… the hand is determined by the top two cards. You cannot disregard your bottom two cards completely, of course, but don’t look down at 8-7-5-2-1 and think you have a premium hand just because you have Deuce-Ace on the bottom. It’s a good hand, but very foldable in the face of heavy betting out of position. Any premium hand beats you, any 7-high beats you and there are a lot of better 8-high hands still left in the deck.
Hand Odds vs. Pot Odds
There are entire volumes of books dedicated to charting odds of each and every hand and bet, so we won’t go into a great deal of detail here. Suffice it to say that you always want to have a general idea of the odds of your hand winning (4:1, 5:1, 20:1) and more often than not it’s just a guess. But pot odds on the other hand can be far more precise. Pot odds refer to the size of the bet in relation to the size of the pot. If the pot is $100 and someone makes a $100 bet, there’s $200 in the pot. If you call the $100 bet, you’re getting 2:1 pot odds. If the pot had $1200 in it and you facing a $300 bet, you’re getting 4:1 pots odds and so on.
To make a 4:1 pot odd bet worth calling, you hand odds need to be very close to that. Calling 4:1 with a hand that’s 20:1 to win is just throwing your money away. Calling 20:1 pot odds with a hand that’s 3:1 to win makes much better sense. Get comfortable with this concept; many times it alone will help you decide if you’re staying in the hand or not.
Table Image
Table image refers to your perception of the other player’s playing style, and their perception of yours. Are they loose players, trying to limp in on every hand? Are they aggressive players, betting huge amounts from any position? Are they solid players, who selectively play only from strong positions with good hands? When you can make and keep these mental notes on your competitors, they become part of the decision making process of how to play a hand. Knowing what they usually do in a particular situation is a big hint about what they’re likely to do again. You can take advantage of that. But they’re watching you too, so try not to give too many of your own secrets away.
Know When to Say When
Perhaps the biggest mistake I see at the tables is players chasing a weak hand through all three drawing rounds. It easy to get caught in the trap, but think about it; there are more high cards in the deck than low cards, so your odds of catching what you need to win are already reduced. If you’re facing 2-4 other players, chances are a lot if not most of the cards you’re hoping to catch are already in their hands, further reducing your odds of catching a winner. If you can draw cheaply it might be worth it, but in general most good players aren’t going to let you off that easy UNLESS they’re pulling you into their monster, in which case you’re probably already beat.
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