What do Mango, Seventy-Five-Cent Mexican, Evil Homer, Four Barrel, Liar’s Poker, and Follow the Queen all have in common? I’ve played all of these games and other similar versions of poker in various home games over the last decade. I actually like a few of them while I hold a serious disdain for the others. I’ll quickly run down some of the best and worst versions of poker that I’ve come across.
Mango
A Wall Street analyst introduced Mango into my New
York City home game at the Blue Parrot. Mango is just
like Texas Holdem with one twist; the turn card is a
wild card. You can imagine how many great hands were
killed after an unlucky turn card. Sure, it’s awesome if you are holding a pocket pair and the turn card
ends up being the same as your pair, because you
automatically have at least four of a kind and
possibility for a straight flush. If you are a Texas
Holdem purist, then you’d dislike Mango as much as I
do. The wild card takes the skill out of the game.
Seventy-Five-Cent Mexican
I’ll take the honor of renaming an old time favorite
game. I used to play on Monday nights at the Trout
House in Seattle, WA. We’d all gather around the kitchen and drink cheap Canadian beer and play a low
stakes dealer’s choice game. At some point I added a
twist to Midnight Baseball. To play Baseball, it’s basically Seven-Card Stud with 3s and 9s wild, and you can purchase a card if you have a 4. Midnight Baseball or No Peek Baseball is similar except you
get all seven cards face down and cannot look at your
cards. Each player turns his cards over one at a
time until he has the best hand at the table. Then you bet. Seventy-Five-Cent Mexican is Midnight Baseball except with $0.75 antes and a minimum bet of $0.75
per round. Those were high stakes for us when the
typical game was $0.25 ante. Some of the biggest pots
I won at the Trout House were during games of
Seventy-Five-Cent Mexican.
Evil Homer
A lawyer who’s a big fan of The Simpsons introduced
Evil Homer to some of the home games I play at in New
York City. It’s Chicago with an added evil twist.
Chicago is basically Seven-Card Stud with half the
pot going to the best hand and the other half of the
pot won by the player with the lowest spade as one of
their three down cards. With Evil Homer, the Jack of Spades is Evil Homer. If you get Evil Homer in the hole, you wait until the last betting round and jump up and do a dance around the table, “I am Evil Homer! I am Evil Homer!” You can now use the Jack of Spades to wipe out any denomination in the deck. If someone has trip Kings showing, you can kill all of the Kings. Evil Homer is a silly and evil game. Although I’m a huge fan of the The Simpsons, I cringe every
time it’s called.
Four Barrel
I played a lot of “Guts” games during college. One game in particular was called Four Barrel. You are dealt four cards and there’s one drawing round. 8s and 4s are wild. Straights and flushes don’t count.
Everyone antes (usually $1 to start) and after you see your hand you have to decide whether or not you
want to play it. You have the option to muck. If you do so, you don’t have to add any more money. If you stay in the hand, you can draw as few as zero cards or if you’re bold, you can pick four more. You can only have four cards in your hand at one time. In order to win the pot, you have to beat out the rest of the players in the hand. If you lose, you have to match the pot and everyone plays for what’s in the pot in the next hand. This continues until one player stays in by himself. When that happens, you have
to beat the imaginary dealer that we named “Zeke.” If you beat Zeke, you win the pot and the game is over. If you lose, you have to match the pot. The game gets
interesting when there are several hundred or even
thousands of dollars in the pot. When you see $500 in
the middle of the table, it’s tempting to try to
bluff at the pot. However, if you lose, you have to
throw in $500! Our games got so out of control that
we had to institute a “max burn” so any given player couldn’t lose more than $100. I’ve won and lost thousands of dollars foolishly playing Four Barrel,
but it’s still one of my favorite games because of
the rush you get when trying to bluff out your
opponents with a crappy hand in order to play Zeke
heads up for over $1,000.
Follow the Queen
I don’t know why this is a popular game. I’ve played
it for over 10 years in home games in Atlanta,
Seattle, and New York City. I can’t stand it because I’ve lost too much money on these types of wild card games. Basically, Follow the Queen is similar to Seven-Card Stud. The wild card varies. In some versions Queens are wild in addition to the card that comes out after the Queen. I’ve played in some games where just the card after the Queen is wild and
Queens are not wild. In yet another instance, the Queen of Spades killed the entire hand and everyone had to re-ante and start all over again.
Liar’s Poker
This game was popularized by Michael’s Lewis book
which was titled Liar’s Poker. I used to play it all the time when I worked on Wall Street. You don’t even need a deck of cards, just a few dollar bills of any denomination. You can play quickly in between sales calls or meetings. A group of six of us would stand in a small circle. We’d play for $20 a round. Using the serial numbers on your dollar bill as “your cards”
you bid on the best hand. You use zeros as the low
and nines as the high. You play until another player
issues a challenge. Let’s say you have 81172779 on
your bill. You start out bidding, “I have two 1s.”
The next player says, “I have two 4s.” Then the next bids, “I have three zeros.” Since my best possible hand is three 7s, I have the option to bluff and say “I have four 7s.” When the action gets to me and I bluff and get “challenged” by any of the other
players, if I lose then I’ll have to pay them $20
each. If I’m not bluffing and have the best hand upon
a challenge, the player who issued that challenge
owes me $20. One guy we worked with was horrible
at Liar’s Poker because he had easy tells. We
couldn’t wait to pick him off. He’d lose $300 a day easily at lunchtime, and other
brokers wanted to play him heads up after work.
Over the last few years I’ve played different types
of poker and versions of mainstream games in home
games all over the country. One thing is for sure,
most of these games are based on luck. There’s very little edge and that’s why most of these games are
called. I’ve grown fond of a few like Seventy-Five-Cent Mexican, Four Barrel, and Liar’s Poker, but for the most part I can’t stand it when someone calls
Mango or Follow the Queen.~~
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