Built to flush

Strategy
1

I built a deck with a goal of drawing flushes during poker as an early foray into deck building. So I picked roughly 9 cards from 5 continuous values (assuming a starting posse of 5 dudes). Since I wanted an excuse to play Miranda Clark, I thought this would work nicely out of Desolation Row with Allie and Makaio. This would also enable me to go heavy on the hearts and clubs while light on deeds and keep on-value cards in my deck.

However, in a test match with roughly 6 draws, I was not able to create a single flush. I generally had a 2 stud shooter and either 1 stud or 1 draw in support. My hypothesis (based on a small sample size) is that to reliably draw flushes, you would need to have a lot of bullets available.

Another hypothesis is that even if I can reliably draw a flush, the deck will need a good bit of hand rank manipulation to overcome a full house. This is especially true given how easy it is to achieve a full house with the variety of 3X decks around.

Are my two hypotheses valid? Would Desolation Row work better built closer to 3X12 or stronger shooting structure?

P.S. In looking at my deck, I had bullet manipulation rather than hand rank manipulation.

2

Have you got a deck list? I can run it through my simulator to see if you were just unlucky but I suspect not drawing flush is true form.

If you’re going for straight flush then 2 values with a Straight Flush through the middle tends to do better. The reliable flush draw decks all originated on Mario Crane running pure clubs.

3

Here is the deck list on Doomtown DB, recently published.

I will go search for a Mario deck that might draw flushes to see the structure.

Thank you for taking a look at the deck!

5

You do not have nearly enough of any one suit to get reliable flushes. If that’s what you’re aiming for, I suggest you hit close to 30 for one suit which will be your primary flush maker.

1 Like
6

30 cars of one suit, that is not at all what I was expecting. I will have to go back to my card collection and see what is available to make that work. Assuming a starting posse of 5 dudes, that still leaves 17 cards to build in the rest of the utility a deck might need.

This is an interesting exercise. Thanks again for the input.

7

http://dtdb.co/en/decklist/1631/108-rascally-rabbits

This was recommended to me in the strong shooting without cheating thread I started. It’s a 3 value deck which can also produce straight flushes as the game goes on.

2 Likes
8

The upcoming SB9 Bad Medicine has the LeMat pistol. If you can get 2 pairs in your flush and get a good stud bullets - that is a nice hand rank boost.

9

Have you tried the deck out at all? I’m curious as to whether other people are regularly getting legal hands with it or if I was just incredibly lucky on the day.

10

No haven’t had a chance to play recently.

11

2 Stud

Determining Hand ranks
Average Cheating hand rank: 6.339800
Average Legal hand rank: 4.978100
Average differential: 1.361700
Cheating Hand rank breakdown
No hand         : 0
High card       : 0
One Pair        : 0
Two Pair        : 1263
Three of a kind : 0
Straight        : 2115
Flush           : 175
Full House      : 4279
Four of a kind  : 1720
Straight Flush  : 209
Five of a kind  : 239
Dead Mans Hand  : 0
Legal Hand rank breakdown
No hand         : 113
High card       : 0
One Pair        : 532
Two Pair        : 2596
Three of a kind : 632
Straight        : 2839
Flush           : 0
Full House      : 2382
Four of a kind  : 658
Straight Flush  : 212
Five of a kind  : 36
Dead Mans Hand  : 0

3 stud

Determining Hand ranks
Average Cheating hand rank: 7.216200
Average Legal hand rank: 5.856300
Average differential: 1.359900
Cheating Hand rank breakdown
No hand         : 0
High card       : 0
One Pair        : 0
Two Pair        : 227
Three of a kind : 0
Straight        : 974
Flush           : 148
Full House      : 5066
Four of a kind  : 2562
Straight Flush  : 465
Five of a kind  : 558
Dead Mans Hand  : 0
Legal Hand rank breakdown
No hand         : 18
High card       : 0
One Pair        : 136
Two Pair        : 1735
Three of a kind : 218
Straight        : 2668
Flush           : 0
Full House      : 3610
Four of a kind  : 1029
Straight Flush  : 488
Five of a kind  : 98
Dead Mans Hand  : 0

4 stud

Determining Hand ranks
Average Cheating hand rank: 7.706100
Average Legal hand rank: 6.512000
Average differential: 1.194100
Cheating Hand rank breakdown
No hand         : 0
High card       : 0
One Pair        : 0
Two Pair        : 0
Three of a kind : 0
Straight        : 431
Flush           : 110
Full House      : 4363
Four of a kind  : 3268
Straight Flush  : 719
Five of a kind  : 1109
Dead Mans Hand  : 0
Legal Hand rank breakdown
No hand         : 0
High card       : 0
One Pair        : 31
Two Pair        : 916
Three of a kind : 79
Straight        : 2212
Flush           : 0
Full House      : 4323
Four of a kind  : 1450
Straight Flush  : 817
Five of a kind  : 172
Dead Mans Hand  : 0
12

Thank you for the statistics. It is interesting to see how even with five values rather than three, it is still easier to draw a full house.

Those must be some fun logic routines that run your Monte Carlo simulations!

13

Those probabilities will change with every card played, and this is exactly what you should aim for, playing as many goods/spells, dudes and deeds to improve your chances to draw a straight flush. Also I would highly recommend to run 5x4 in clubs (minimum). There are also other things like, not keeping two actions cards of the same value in hand, keeping only the ones you can always play in stootout etc.