In such a game you can afford to draw more than one card the first time, but if you stay for the last draw you will either stand pat or draw just one card, hoping for a low card that does not pair with any of your other four.Īlthough Draw Poker is perhaps the most usual form of Lowball game, the Lowball version of Five Card Stud also works well, and Seven Card Stud Low is also played under the name Razz. For this reason, there are versions of lowball in which players have more than one opportunity to draw. If you draw two cards you will make a pair about half the time, and however low the three cards are that you keep, your chance of getting a 9-high or better is never more than 25%. When drawing to a five-card hand to make a low hand, it is seldom worth drawing more than one card. Paired cards always count, so in the absence of straights and flushes a hand of five different ranks always beats a hand containing any duplicate ranks. The differences depend on whether Aces are counted as high or low, and whether straights and flushes count. The different possible rankings for low poker are explained on the hand ranking page. They differ in the hand ranking, the drawing procedure and whether a wild card is used. On this page several versions of this game are described. Most poker variants can be reversed in this way, but the name 'Lowball' is most often used to refer to a low version of Five Card Draw Poker.

Our opponent plays extremely face up on the final street and we can pick up pots as a bluff.Lowball or Low Poker is poker in which the lowest ranking hand wins.

(Note that this applies purely to no-limit 5-card draw games and it's nearly always going to be a mistake to call a raise preflop with a straight-draw or flush-draw in a limit game) Our opponent just can't fold at showdown and hence we have great implied odds.

We don't want to make hard and fast rules here but there are some exceptions vs passive opponents where we can get away with cold-calling these hands for one of the two following reasons in a no-limit-game The exception is that there are already 2 limpers in the pot, in which case it's fine to limp behind some straight-draws and flush-draws, but gut-shots should typically be folded. It may seem attractive to be dealt 4-to-a-straight or 4-to-a-flush, but we usually won't hit them often enough to make up for our preflop investment. In most cases we should avoid drawing to flushes and straights.

How to determine 5 card draw