PokerStars Badugi Tournaments

A favorite destination for poker players to immerse themselves in the poker variant, Badugi is the leading online gaming site, PokerStars. This poker room introduced Badugi to its repertoire in November, 2008 and since then has become one of the only sites to offer players serious competition and an excellent range of gaming limits and stakes.

Badugi, which originated in Asia, is a variant of what we know as draw poker. The game shares a number of similarities with Lowball because the lowest hand wins instead of the traditional highest hand. In Badugi, the hand ranking system differs as the strongest hands have no pairs and four low cards (one of each suit).

With the growing popularity of Badugi came the inclusion of this variant in PokerStars’ busy tournament schedule. The game is offered at the site’s multi table tournament schedule, in both fixed limit options and pot-limit Badugi tournaments. Players will be able to find tournaments with low buy ins beginning every few hours at PokerStars – both fixed limit and pot limit. The site also boasts a nightly fixed limit event with a higher buy in fee.

Badugi is not only found as a multi-table option on the tournament circuit. There are also a number of Sit and Go options, either as full ring (eight handed) games or one to one heads up games. PokerStars has made sure that the choice of stakes is wide at these tournaments too; however the largest concentration of players is felt at micro limit games.

PokerStars has been singly responsible for the growth of popularity in Badugi. The site added this variant to the World Championship of Poker for the first time in 2009 and hosted the largest Badugi tournament in September of that year. There were hopes to include Badugi in the 2010 World Series of Poker lineup, especially after Matt Savage added the game to the 2010 LA Poker Classic Event, however this never happened.

Thankfully, the WSOP 2011 lineup shows that Badugi will finally make a well- deserved appearance for the first time and it stands to reason that PokerStars will be offering satellites to the WSOP Badugi event. In the meantime, online poker players can hone their poker skills by entering daily Badugi tournaments at PokerStars and preparing themselves for the game’s debut at WSOP 2011. This is why Pokerstars is the leader of the top badugi poker sites.