Omaha Hi-Lo poker: the dish is divided between the highest and lower hand

The Omaha High-Low, or "hi-lo", is an interesting variant of the omha poker in which the dish is divided between the best high hand and the best low hand.

To determine the highest hand, the traditional ranking of the scores is used, while to determine the best low hand, the so -called ACE TO FIVE (or California) ranking is used, which for simplicity we report below. The limit score that qualifies as low is 8-7-6-5-4, that is, the worst low hand (the seed counts nothing). All the other hands that include cards of different value lower than 9 are considered low hands:

  • 5-4-3-2-A, "Wheel" or "wheel", the best low hand
  • 6-4-3-2-A, Six-Low, the highest card is 6
  • 7-5-3-2-A, Seven-Low, the highest card is 7
  • 8-6-5-2, Eight -low, the highest card is 8

In the event of a tightest card, we move on to consider the second lower card and so on. In case of absolute draw, the portion of the dish reserved for the low hand is divided between multiple players.
For example: one hand 6 ♠ 4 ♥ 3 ♠ 2 ♦ A ♦ beats a hand 6 ♠ 5 ♥ 4 ♦ 2 ♦ A ♠

Two important notes: 1) The presence of a color or a staircase does not invalidate the value of a low hand ace to five. 2) The seeds are completely irrelevant.

The rules in detail:

Since OMAHA Hi-Lo Poker follows exactly the same general rules and game phases of the classic variant, here we will limit ourselves to exposing the peculiarities, referring to other information on the "basic" game at Omaha poker rules.

As in the classic Omha, the point of each player must be composed using two of the own papers united to 3 of the community cards on the board.

The low hands, in order to be considered valid, must be composed of 5 cards of different value, the highest of which must not exceed 8. In the event that no player makes a low hand, the entire dish is won by the player with the best high hand.

In addition, it is possible that the same player contributes for the entire dish, because the same cards can be declared both as higher hand and as lower hand. For example, a 5-4-3-2-a Wheel, in addition to being the lowest hand, is still a staircase, which could prove to be the highest point among those made by the opponents.

In the event that the normal division of the dish takes place, if there is an odd number of chips, the sur one is assigned to the player with the highest hand.

Finally, a curiosity: the Omaha Hi-it is commonly indicated also with the following words, "Omaha High-Low", "Omaha Hilo", "Omaha 8" and "8 OR Better".