High Ball Review

What Is High Ball ?

The term ‘high ball’ is used to describe standard play in Poker, where the winner is the player with the highest scoring hand. Alternatively, ‘low ball’ Poker refers to the opposite of the standard rule of ranking where the winner is the player with the lowest scoring hand.

High Ball Explained

‘High ball’ refers to a standard Poker game, where the normal rules apply and the player with the highest scoring hand, wins. Often, the rules of the game are reversed, where the player holding the lowest scoring hand wins, and this is called ‘low ball’ Poker.

Following the sequence ranking highest to lowest, as seen in ‘high ball’ Poker is: a royal flush, a straight flush, four-of-a-kind, a full house, a flush, a straight, three-of-a-kind, two pairs, a pair, and lastly, a high card. In a high-card hand, the player with the highest cards wins over the other person with a high-card hand of a score lower.

However, in a ‘low ball’ game, this ranking system is reversed. In this type of poker game, there are only a few ways of making low hands to rank. These include the most popular system of ranking for ‘low ball’ known as the ace-to-five low. The others are ace-to-six low as well as deuce-to-seven-low. The system ace-to-five in itself consists of many variations, such as high-low Poker. In this kind of Poker, the pot is shared among the players with the lowest hand with those that have the highest. In the case that the pot is not evenly divided, the player possessing the high hand takes any leftover chips.

The popularity of this type of game within casinos is due to the many different ways in which to win. The variety of different rankings help to keep it very interesting.