Trailing in Lowball: Drawing to Eights

You're playing limit lowball, Southern California style. You're on the button. Three people have come into the pot for a raise. You have 8-6-2-A-K. "Aha!" you think. "I'm already getting nearly 4-to-1, and if the big blind calls, I'll get better than 4-1. It's certainly worth playing this one. If both blinds call, I'll get 5-to-1." Is it a good play for you to call in this situation?

Let's see just how well this hand fares in typical circumstances.

First, compare your 8-6 draw to four other hands, one of them a pat 8 plus three players drawing to better hands than you are:

"But, but," you protest, "most of the cards I need are tied up in the other hands." OK. Let's compare to these hands:

"Well," you say, "how about against fewer players?" OK, here's about the best you can hope for: two players drawing to hands that can't win if they catch an 8 and you make your hand, and one pat 9, very rough.

"Well, what if I have the joker?"

The most common lowball situation is three players each drawing one card. Here are a few typical comparisons:

With five players, a hand has a positive expectation if it wins more than 20 percent of the time. If the hand wins less than 20 percent of the time, it has a negative expectation; that is, playing it is a losing proposition over the long run. With four players, the figure is 25 percent, and with three, it is 33.33 percent. You can see that in every one of these comparisons, drawing one to an 8 is a losing play, even that so-called "best" situation shown earlier. Does that mean that it is never right in lowball to draw to an 8? No. Winning lowball strategy has you draw to eights if you are in late position and are opening the pot, or if you are in a blind and a player in late position has opened the pot. It is usually not correct to open to draw to an 8 from early or middle position, nor is it correct to call to draw to an 8 if someone has already opened from early or middle position.

The results in this column were obtained with Mike Caro's Poker Probe.

(Note: Due to rounding, some of the percentage figures may not add up to exactly 100 percent.)

Michael Wiesenberg's The Official Dictionary of Poker is the ultimate authority on the language of cardrooms. Order it online at CardPlayer.com. And look for The 1,000 Best Casinos in the World soon.