A famous poker player once said that one of the most important things for a beginning poker player to have was a guide telling them which hands they should play and which hands they should throw away. Now, this particular person was talking about Texas Hold Em at the time, but there is no reason why we can borrow this reasoning and apply it to the game of Razz in order to generate a list of starting hands that should be used by the beginner when they are just starting to get the hang of the game.
Whenever a player is just starting to get the hang of a game, the usual method is to start off playing like a rock and then make the transition to playing more hands later when the player understands how the game works better. With that particular piece of information in mind, the starting hand selection given below will make you a rock player. You will only enter pots when you have really good hands. In Razz, every hand is a drawing hand since the object of the game is to make the lowest five-card poker hand possible and for that reason playing like a rock means something a little different in Razz then it does in Hold Em. There are no made hands in Razz; no equivalents to pocket rockets or cowboys.
That having been said, there are good draws and there are bad draws. For example, a good drawing hand would be a hand that has three cards that you think would be part of a winning low hand. The best way to gauge this would be to think about qualifying low requirements in Hi/Lo games and realize that an eight low is usually a pretty good hand. If you want to play a few more starting hands, you can extend that to a nine low and play any three cards that are nine or lower (discounting pairs and trips, of course). This is a good way to start and it will make you into a medium rock that is willing to enter hands with pretty good draws.
If you want to be a serious rock however, you should extend those requirements to any three cards nine low or better provided that at least two of those cards are part of the nut low hand. This is a very strong draw and it is one that you can bet aggressively all the way down to the river. If you want to reduce the number of decisions you have to make on later streets, this is the strategy to use. Just wait for those hands and then bet them aggressively.
Razz Poker Strategy is sometimes difficult to grasp and that is what gives Razz Poker its infamous higher variance. For more Razz Poker Strategy articles, feel free to visit our website.
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