Last time I discussed how I think the pot should be split in a high-low declare game when the player who declares both ways (that is, the swing hand) loses. I said that the pot should be split between the remaining highest and lowest hand. I feel that this rewards players for cleverly being aware of situations in which a player who ought not to be declaring high-low does so anyway. I feel also that a player should not walk into the whole pot just because he happens to hold the hand that beats the high-low hand for one way only; there’s no skill in that: it’s just luck. The skill is being aware of situations that might not otherwise come up.
An example makes this clearer. I was playing in a small-limit home game of dealer’s choice in which the rule was as I have described: If you declared both ways, you must clearly win both ways, otherwise you lost all claim to any part of the pot. If the high-low hand lost or tied either high or low, that was it; that hand was then out of contention for any portion of the pot. If the high-low hand was so eliminated, the pot was then split between the remaining highest and lowest hand. On rare occasions, a situation arose permitting a player to take advantage of the rule, and win part or even all of a pot with a hand that was not the best for the direction it had declared.
On my deal, I usually called high-low draw, two draws, with a bet after the declare. Most of the other players called various forms of high-low stud, because of the multiple rounds of betting, and refrained from variations of draw, because draw usually has only two rounds …
