Buddys Game Rules

Buddys Game was contributed to pagat.com by Bob and Robin Procter. Its players later came to call it Doogie, after its low hand. It uses a standard 52-card deck with no jokers or wild cards; the source describes games of up to seven players.

It is a high-low split game. The high hand is a normal five-card poker hand, ranked by the standard poker hand rankings.

The low hand is a doogie: four cards, one of each suit, with no two of the same rank. The lowest doogie wins. A doogie is described by its highest card, so a 7 doogie has no card higher than a seven. The perfect doogie is A-2-3-4 in four different suits. This is an early form of the low hand used in Badugi.

Qualifiers. A high hand must be three of a kind or better to win. A low hand must be a 7 doogie or better.

The dealer shall announce any ante, the betting limits and the prices of the buys before the deal. The source does not set these.

The dealer deals four cards face down to each player.

Before the first betting round, each player may buy replacements for one or two of their cards, discarding them face down and receiving new cards from the deck.

The dealer then places four cards face down in the centre of the table in a two-by-two square, like a block of four postage stamps.

The second buy. After all four table cards are face up, each player may either buy a fifth card for their hand, or replace one card in their hand. A replacement costs less than a fifth card.

If the deck runs out during the second buy, the last card of the deck is shuffled together with the discards to supply the remaining buys.

The source does not set out the betting after the second buy. In Doogie, as played by the same contributors, a betting round follows the last table card, then the players declare and there is a final betting round. The dealer shall announce the procedure before the deal.

Declaration. The contributors declare with chips held hidden in the hand and revealed together: no chip for low, one chip for high, two chips for both ways.

A player makes their hands from their own cards and the table cards. Table cards may be used together only if they lie in a straight line, meaning they touch along a side. Two cards that meet only at a corner, diagonally, may not be used together.

In practice this means a player may use any one table card, or any two that share a row or a column of the square.

The best qualifying high hand among players who declared high or both wins the high half, and the best qualifying low hand among players who declared low or both wins the low half.

Under the contributors' Doogie rules, the perfect doogie (A-2-3-4 in four suits) wins both the high and the low, and a player who ties with the best possible hand does not lose the hand because of the tie.

The high qualifier of three of a kind is strict, so many hands play only for low.

Because the second and first table cards are diagonal to each other, they can never be used together. The third card turned decides which pairs of table cards become usable.

A doogie needs four suits. A hand holding two cards of the same suit, or a pair, needs the buys or the table to fix it.