Badugi Hi-Lo

It’s Badugi, except the pot is split between low and “high”, and “high” is read backwards

You may have seen Badugi: four cards, three draws, you want four different suits and four different ranks, and the lowest hand wins. Badugi Hi-Lo plays exactly the same, with the same deal, draws and betting. The only change is who wins: half the pot goes to the best low badugi, half to the best high badugi.

The twist is how “high” works. A high badugi is still a badugi (four suits, four ranks), but you judge it from the bottom up: the hand whose lowest card is highest wins. So K-Q-J-10 is a great high hand, and A-2-3-4, the best low hand, is awful for high. The best hand for one half is nearly the worst for the other. Haney calls this “the variant that causes the most angst for new players.”

30-second cheat sheet

• Four cards, three draws, four betting rounds, button and blinds. Fixed limit is the usual structure.
• Low half: regular Badugi. Four different suits and ranks beats three-card hands. Lowest wins. Best is A-2-3-4 in four suits.
• High half: you still need a valid badugi (four suits, four ranks). Then the winner is the hand with the highest lowest card. Compare lowest cards first, then the next-lowest, and so on. Haney: “you simply read the hand backwards.”
• The ace is both. It plays as the lowest card for the low half and as the highest card for the high half.
• The same four cards can win both halves, but it’s rare: a great low is a terrible high, and the other way around.

Full rules

The deal and draws

Same as Badugi. Button and two blinds, four cards face down, three draws (replace 0 to 4 cards each time), and a betting round before the first draw and after each one. It’s typically a limit game. Card Player Lifestyle says it’s “played exactly the same as the original”.

The low half

The normal Badugi winner. A badugi is four cards, all different suits and all different ranks. A four-card badugi beats any three-card hand, and so on. Among equals, the lowest hand wins, comparing from the highest card down. The best is A-2-3-4 with four suits.

The high half

You still need a valid badugi to win the high half. Among badugis, the winner is the hand with the highest low card. If two hands have the same lowest card, compare the next-lowest, then the next, and so on. Card Player Lifestyle puts it as “the player holding the highest low card wins”.

The ace counts as both. In the low half it’s the lowest card. In the high half it’s the top card.

Here are the examples from the sources. All of these are rainbows.

• J♣ 8♠ 7♦ 5♥ is a “jack-low” and a “five-high”. Q♠ 8♥ 5♦ 4♣ is a “queen-low” and a “four-high”. The first hand wins both halves: jack-low beats queen-low (J is lower than Q), and the five beats the four for high.
• K-Q-5-3 versus J-10-5-7 (Card Player Lifestyle): the second hand wins both ways. For low, jack-high beats king-high. For high, its lowest card, 5, beats 3.
• A♠ 8♥ 7♦ 6♣ is an eight-low (8-7-6-A) and a six-high (compare from the bottom: 6, 7, 8, then the ace as the top card). Heads-up it can’t be scooped, but in a three-way pot against K-Q-10-9 and 7-6-5-3 it wins nothing. K-Q-10-9 wins high (lowest card 9 beats 6), and 7-6-5-3 wins low (seven-low beats eight-low). Haney’s example.

What if there are no badugis, or only three-card hands?

The sources don’t say how the high half compares three-card hands, or what the odd chip rule is. [INFERENCE: use the Badugi rule for both halves, so more cards beats fewer, and confirm with the floor.] A forum poster assumed that any badugi beats all three-card hands for high too. That’s an assumption, not a rule I found.

What’s the best high badugi?

The sources I read don’t name the nut high hand outright. By the rule as they describe it, with the ace as the top card in the high half, A-K-Q-J in four suits has the highest low card (a jack) and would be the best high badugi, ahead of K-Q-J-10. [INFERENCE] If a room doesn’t count the ace high for this, K-Q-J-10 is the nuts. Ask.

Rooms disagree

I found no real conflict, but the sourcing is thin. Only Haney (Card Player, writing about the Resorts World Coach’s Game) and Card Player Lifestyle’s Mixed Game Festival rule sheet describe it, and they agree.

• Naming: “Badugi High-Low” (Haney), “Badugi Hi-Low” (Card Player Lifestyle), “Badugi hi/lo” (a 2+2 thread title I only saw as a search snippet).
• A labeling slip: Card Player Lifestyle calls J-10-7-5 “Jack-low and 7-high”, but Haney’s rule (judge the high half by the lowest card) would call it five-high. The ruling in that example comes out the same either way, so treat the “7-high” label as loose wording.

How you’ll embarrass yourself

• Thinking “high badugi” means the biggest top card. It’s judged from the bottom up: the highest lowest card.
• Calling A-2-3-4 a great hand. It’s the nut low, but its lowest card is a deuce, about as bad as it gets for high. A hand that’s nutty for one half is nearly dead for the other.
• Forgetting the ace plays both ways. A-8-7-6 is decent in both directions and can still lose both halves in a multiway pot.
• Assuming a hand that can’t be scooped heads-up is safe multiway. In a three-way pot, a hand can win nothing at all.

Lore and reputation

It’s one of the 17 games in the Resorts World “Coach’s Game” mix in Las Vegas, run by Donald “Coach” Shiflett Jr., per Haney in Card Player (January 2023). Haney called it “a ton of fun”, and said many players who were initially turned off by it now rate it as one of their favorites in the mix. The Coach’s Game was an $8-$16 fixed-limit mix. Resorts World’s poker room has since closed, on 30 March 2026, according to a Vegas room-review site, though that’s from a search-engine summary and I didn’t open it directly.

It also appears on Card Player Lifestyle’s Mixed Game Festival rule sheet. I found no source for who invented it, and it’s not on the WSOP Dealer’s Choice menu. A 2+2 poster (opinion, from a search snippet) said the split-pot concept makes a scoop hard to see and that reading the high hand “feels like Calvinball”.