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 he Guardian G2 Poker Column |
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| Victoria
Coren |
| Monday January 22,
2007 |
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Time to buckle your belts for London lowball. If you're the kind of
person who moans that you never get good cards, you're going to love this game.
It is poker in reverse: the pot is won by whoever has the worst hand. A pair is
no good. Straights and flushes are worse. Four of a kind is a disaster.
Everything is turned backwards; it's Poker Through the Looking Glass. As Joey
Hawthorne says in Super System, "The first lowball game was almost certainly
played as a joke."
The structure is just like seven-card stud, so I
hope you caught last week's column on how that is played. For the unfamiliar, a
series on poker variants is like Twin Peaks or 24: miss one episode, and the
whole thing's sunk. |
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The difference is, you're now choosing
your worst (ie lowest) five cards from the seven in front of you. For the
purposes of this game, aces are the lowest card in the deck. So the worst hand
(and therefore the best hand) is A2346, because these are the lowest five cards
that don't make a straight. You want five low cards, no pairs, no straights, no
flushes, and the lowest hand wins. If two people have the same high card, you
move downwards to work out the winner, so 34568 beats 34578.
In
America, and on the internet, they play Razz, which is the same, except that
straights and flushes are ignored. So the worst (and therefore best) hand is
A2345.
Strategically, you don't want to enter the pot unless your first
three cards are all lower than 9. If someone else shows a 9 or higher, they
must have very small cards "in the hole", which should help you put them on an
exact hand later. If you keep hitting low cards, never stop betting. Most
importantly, don't forget to enjoy the schadenfreude when somebody is dealt
three kings and has to fold immediately.
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