How to play ace to five lowball

How low hands rank

Everyone plays for the lowest five-card hand. Aces are always low. Straights and flushes do not count, so 5-4-3-2-A, a straight in high poker, is the best hand here: the wheel, in any suits. Then come 6-4-3-2-A, 6-5-3-2-A, 6-5-4-2-A, 6-5-4-3-A and 6-5-4-3-2, then the 7-lows, starting with 7-4-3-2-A. Look at the highest card first and lower wins; if those match, look at the next one down. Suits never matter, so an ace and a five are good because they are the two ends of the wheel, not because they are suited.

Hands are named by their highest card, so 8-6-4-3-A is an eight-low. Set it against 8-7-5-4-2, another eight-low. The eights match, then the six is lower than the seven, so the first hand wins. Deuce-to-seven, the other common low ranking, does it the other way: aces are high and straights and flushes count against you. Here they do not, and a deuce is just a two.

A pair is bad news. Any unpaired hand, five different ranks, beats any hand with a pair, even K-Q-J-10-9. Among paired hands one pair is best, then two pair, three of a kind, a full house, and four of a kind is worst, the reverse of high poker. That order is ours: Wikipedia says only that one pair beats two pair and three of a kind. Inside a category the repeated cards count first, and A-A is the best pair: 3-3-6-4-2 beats 3-3-6-5-A.

The deal and the blinds

The game is five card draw. Razz plays low with seven card stud, and it is not dealt here. One standard pack of 52, no joker, for two to six seats. Everyone starts the match with 500 play chips. The button moves round the table every hand. The seat left of it posts a small blind of 5 and the next seat a big blind of 10. With only two seats, the dealer posts the small blind. Blinds come out of your chips at the deal and count as bets.

Each seat gets five cards, one at a time, face down, starting from the small blind. Nobody sees another hand until the showdown, and a hand that folds is never shown.

The first round of betting

This is the first of two betting rounds. The seat after the big blind goes first, then it goes round the table. You can fold, call or raise, and you can check only when nobody has bet. Calling costs the current bet minus what you have already put in this round. Fold is offered only when calling costs something. The big blind may check, or raise, when the action comes back to it.

Bets are fixed: a bet or raise is exactly 10 before the draw, and the big blind counts as the first bet. Three raises are allowed on top of it while three or more seats are still in, four bets in all, which is 40 chips. With only two seats left there is no cap on raises. Every button shows its cost, and when one is missing the board says why.

The draw

When the betting settles, the seats still in draw one after another, starting with the first on the dealer's left. Each throws away 0 to 5 cards, face down, and takes the same number from the stock. Throwing away none is standing pat. There is one draw, and everybody can see how many cards each seat drew, never which ones.

If the stock runs short, the discards of the seats that drew earlier in that draw are shuffled back in. A folded hand never is, and your own discards never come back to you. A tip from Pagat: it is seldom worth drawing more than one card, because draw two and you make a pair about half the time.

The second round and the showdown

The first seat still in on the dealer's left starts the second round, and with two seats left that is the seat that is not the dealer. Bets and raises are 20 now, so four bets come to 80 while three or more seats are in. Check, bet, call, raise and fold work as before.

If everyone else folds, the last seat takes the pot and shows nothing. Otherwise every seat still in shows its hand and the lowest hand wins. Say two seats each put in 10 before the draw and a bet of 20 was called after it: the pot holds 60, and the lower hand takes all of it. Equal hands split it. If 65 is in the pot and two seats tie, one takes 33 and the other 32, and the extra chip goes to the tied seat nearest the dealer's left. Then everyone still in presses Ready for the next hand.

Going all in, and side pots

Nobody is forced out of a hand for lack of chips. A seat that cannot cover a bet goes all in for the chips it has. It stays in, still draws and goes to the showdown, but it makes no more bets, and the other seats carry on betting among themselves.

The pots are worked out at the end. A seat can win from each of the others only as much as it put in itself, so the chips it could not match go into a side pot, and the lowest hand among the seats that put into that pot takes it. The chips of a seat that folded stay in the pots, and it wins none of them. Say one seat has only 30 to put in and two others put in 50 each: the main pot is 90, and the two others play for 40 more in a side pot.

One more rule, Pagat's for fixed limit games. A raise that goes all in for less than half a bet does not reopen the betting, so a seat that has already had its say may only call or fold. Half a bet is measured from the last full bet or raise, so two short all-ins in a row can add up: once they take the bet half a bet or more above it, the raise counts as a full one, and every seat may fold, call or raise again.

Play chips and the match

The chips are play chips: a running score for one table. Nothing is bought, won or kept, and nothing carries over to the next table.

The host picks a match of 6, 12 or 20 hands, 12 by default. After the last hand the seat with the most chips wins, and equal chips share the win. A seat that ends a hand with fewer than 10 chips is out for the rest of the match and watches, and the match ends early if fewer than two seats can post the big blind.

Playing ace to five lowball online

Open a table for two to six seats and drop everyone the link, or play against one to three computers. No account, nothing to install.

The rules follow John McLeod's Pagat page on California Lowball, cross-checked with Wikipedia's Lowball page. Where they leave a choice open, the choices above are ours: the blinds, doubling the bet after the draw, the cap on raises, the order of paired hands and the length of a match.