What is Drawing dead?
Drawing dead → 1. Drawing dead is when a player has no outs to make the best hand by the river.
Example usage → “He flopped the boat so I was drawing dead”
Explanation of Drawing dead
Drawing dead carries the idea of it being impossible to win at showdown regardless of which cardsfall on the turn or river. Let’s take a quick look at a Hold’em example.
Board: T♣J♦J♥
Player 1: J♠J♣
Player 2: Q♣K♣
Despite the fact that player 2 holds an open ended straight draw and a backdoor flush draw he is drawing dead. Regardless of which cards fall, he’ll never be able to outdraw quads. Note that even the backdoor royal flush is impossible since villain holds the required Jc.
Example of Drawing Dead used in a sentence -> It seems like an ok spot for us, but it turned out we were drawing dead against villain’s quads.
How to Use Drawing dead as Part of Your Poker Strategy
We can’t always avoid drawing dead in poker, but we do want to be especially careful when playing dominated drawing hands. If there is a chance that our drawing hand is already drawing dead, then we typically suffer from reverse-implied-odds and need an excellent price in order to justify a call.
Examples include -
1. Drawing to a flush on a paired board.
2. Drawing to the low end of a straight.
3. Drawing to a straight where this is already a flush possible.
See Also
Draws, Hold’em, Boat, Hand-Rankings, Implied Odds, Reverse Implied Odds, Boat, Board
