What’s the Booray

This is a 5-card draw guts game at heart which consists of three sub-games: Low-Spit (low-hand poker), Boo-Ray (a trump/tricks game) and Kings-And-Little-Ones (KALO) (a high wild-card poker game).

As it is a guts game, you don’t have to play your hand if you do not wish. But if you do, here’s how, and what, you can play.

Dealing and Anteing:

Play starts by each person anteing $1 into the pot (or whatever your traditional ante is). The dealer then deals 5 down cards to each player. The remaining cards are placed in front of the dealer and except for the top-card, they will be used as draw cards.

The top-card of the draw stack is turned up for everyone to see and its suit becomes the Booray trump suit. 

Note: After dealing, the dealer sometimes forgets to turn up the top-card. Someone inevitably says, “What’s the Booray?” Hence the origin of the game’s name.

Choosing a game: 

Each person takes three chips in his/her hand: one blue, one red and one white (these are the colors with which we play — you may choose your own colors of course). 

Each of the chip colors represents a different game: Red = KALO, White = Low-Spit and Blue = Booray. 

Every person selects which games s/he wants to play by picking the appropriate colored chip and holding it in their closed hand. Everyone holds out their closed hand above the table. When all players have selected their game, players open their hands and show their selected games. Players with matching colored chips play each other. 

If someone chooses a game and runs unopposed (i.e., no other player has chosen a matching colored chip), s/he gets 1 point.

All games are 5-card draw.

Low-Spit: The worst poker hand wins. Straights and flushes are not counted. We play with the wheel (A-2-3-4-5) as the best low hand. You may choose to play (A-2-3-4-6) if you wish.

KALO: The low card in your hand and the kings are wild. Obviously if you draw a lower card, that new card becomes your wild. So, if you are dealt (K-Q-7-3-3) and you throw the Q-7 and draw an J-2 (K-J-3-3-2), the deuce becomes your new wild card and quad threes becomes your best hand. Aces can play low (as wild) beneath a 2 if you wish.

Booray: The person who takes the most tricks out of the 5 possible tricks wins. A trick is taken by throwing the best card of everyone in this game. Starting from the dealer’s left, each person playing this game throws one card face up into the pot. The person who throws the best card takes the trick. Trump suit beats all non-trump suit cards. Trump Ace is the best card and therefore is automatically the winner of a trick. Higher value trump cards beat lower value trump cards.

Multiplicity: A player is allowed to play as many of the games as s/he chooses by selecting mutliple-colored chips. But you may only draw once and must use your hand to play both games. For example, if you are dealt an A-2-3-4-5, all of the trump suit (re: flush), then you may wish to play both low-poker (b/c you have the wheel which is out best low hand) and booray (b/c you have 5 cards of the trump suit and have the trump ace, which is a guaranteed winner). In this case, you would select a white and a blue chip to hold in your hand. If you run unopposed in both games, you would get two points. If you run unopposed in one game but opposed in another, you get one point for the unopposed game and would play out the opposed game.

Forced-go: On the first hand that is dealt, players are forced to play one of the three games. This can help build up the pot — especially useful when there’s only 4 or 5 players b/c the chance of three people picking the same game is increased.

Forced Till Doubles: Sometimes even with a first-round forced go, the pot doesn’t double. So we call this version and require a forced go until we get a doubled-pot. All depends on how rich we’re feeling that night.