More on how to play Deuce-Four

I played another $15 tournament on Bodog this afternoon. I had the Mighty Deuce-Four four times. I thought I would give you all yet another little tutorial on how to play it.

The first option is to flop two pair, like this:




Or like this:




But if you have enough skill to pull it off, I would really recommend using it to hit a gutshot straight draw on the turn, when your opponent slow-plays his flopped two pair. That's the kind of play that is more likely to maximize your winnings:




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An aside:

I realize that these Bodog hand histories are terribly difficult to read. Their format is maddeningly bizarre, compared to those of more mainstream sites. I apologize. If I could put the hands into a replayer for you, I would. If I could just run them through a program that rendered them into a more straightforward, chronological order with the extraneous bits cut out, I would. But I don't know of any easy way to do either, and trying to type out who bet what and which cards came is too much work.

Heck, it's hard enough just getting the hand histories in this lousy format. They are not stored on one's hard drive. In order to look at the last hand played during a tournament, you can't just click on "last hand" as at Full Tilt and Stars. No, you have to go back to the main lobby, click on "account," then click on "hand history," then specify tournaments or cash games and the date, click "search," then scroll down the list of hands to the last one, and click on that hand number. It's a horrible, horrible system. Also, it took me a while to figure out how to use a screen capture utility I have to get the entire history at once into a JPEG, as it has to be able to auto-scroll the window in order to acquire the whole thing. It's just a nasty mess. But it's the best I've been able to figure out so far.

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What about the last 2-4 I had, you ask? Well, you wouldn't believe it even if I posted the hand history, so I won't bother. Final table, 7 players left. I was the short stack. I had 2c-4c. I shoved, just trying to steal the blinds. Of course, I was delighted when the small blind called me and had K-K. I was about a 99:1 favorite. But he got lucky and sucked out on me, and I was done. Picked up $85 for the fairly deep finish, but wish I could have done better. Just goes to show you that nothing in poker is certain, not even the 2c-4c. Especially on sites that are so obviously rigged.