As the name suggests, London Lowball is a card game that is mostly played in Europe and is a lowball stud poker game. Fans of Seven-Card Stud and Razz will understand the basics of the game. London Lowball is a variant of Razz that is played almost exactly the same as Razz, but it has one notable difference: straights and flushes count as high hands against a player, so the lowest possible winning hand is Ace, Two, Three, Four, Six. London Lowball is usually played as a pot-limit game, but the game can be played as a no-limit game as well.
All of the other normal Razz rules are followed in the game. Each player gets two cards face down and one card face up. The person with the highest card up bets first, and play continues clockwise. After the initial round of betting, all other betting rounds are initiated by the player with the lowest hand showing. The player with the best five-card low hand they can make out of their seven total cards wins the game.
It is very important to pay attention to the hands of your opponents in Razz and London Lowball. If you are showing Three, Four, Seven as your up cards, and there are other threes, fours and sevens in the face up hands of other players, then you know that the odds of you pairing up your cards is lower. It is unlikely that any player with a face up pair will end up with a good hand, so you should bet accordingly when players have pairs showing.
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