The eight qualifier in Hi/Lo split games

Poker Variants / Marcus Bateman / 28 January 2011 / Leave a Comment

When people first started playing Hi/Lo split games, there was always both a high hand and a low hand. You could even win the low hand with a straight flush - provided that your opponent had a better one - and for many years this was the standard format for Hi/Lo split games.

This format actually favoured good players, as it made playing high hands even more dangerous than it is in Hi/Lo games with a qualifier (due to low hands being able to develop into high but not vice versa), and anyone with a solid working knowledge of these games would have destroyed these games against people habitually playing high hands.

Poker regulars being the helpful people that they are though, they soon made it common knowledge that anyone playing high hands was a fish, with the result that the games became tight and boring, with the ultimate result of scaring away the weak players - who don't like tight, boring games - especially ones that should be as wild as Hi/Lo split games with bits of pots flying everywhere.

As a result, to get the action running in the games again, regulars invented the 'qualifier' system, whereby to have a low, a player had to have five unpaired cards under an eight - any hand not fitting this criteria could not win the low half of the pot. This meant that playing high hands became much less of a leak, with the result that many of the fish came flocking back to the games again.

Although the qualifier never quite nullified the edge low hands have over high ones, it made a big dent to the over all strategy needed in Hi/Lo split games, and forced even the tightest players into playing some high hands in order to keep themselves afloat and winning enough pots to beat the ante.

The moral of this story is two fold. Firstly, don't tell weak players they are idiots for playing a certain way - you do more damage to the game than you can possibly imagine. Secondly, although low hands are more powerful than high, due to the qualifier you have to play some high hands, and learning to pick the right spots to do so is critical to long term success.

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