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What You Get for Being a Pig
By Squeege

Ernest Koney-Li opened a thread on RGP with a great question about Hi-Lo games. One of the gutsiest parts about these split pot games is that it's a player's option to call "Both", "Hi and Lo", or "Pig". Different terms depending on your table, but they all mean the same thing... you're going for it all.

Where rules in the game permit, you may possibly have both the highest hand and the lowest hand at the table. How could such a thing happen? If you're the last player in the pot, then obviously by default you have both winning hands and win the entire pot. But, our discussion requires the more complex examples.

If you are playing a game with more than five cards (Anaconda, Seven-Card Stud, etc.), then Hi-Lo rules permit you to make two hands of combinations of five cards, one for high and one for low. If you playing a game with wild cards, then Hi-Lo rules permit you to make the two hands using the wild cards in different ways. So, obviously a game like straight Five-Card Stud doesn't permit you to put more than one hand together (unless of course you're playing where Straights and Flushes do not count against Lo hands, in which case a single set of five cards could win both Hi and Lo).

So, when you think you have both Hi and Lo hands, you may decide to make a shot at the combined pot. When it comes time to declare whether or not you are going for Hi or Lo, you shout out "Pig!" as your way of saying you are going Hi and Lo for the whole pot. The question that came out of this thread is what happens when the player who goes pig has the one hand won, but not the other. It's more complicated than you think.

The scenario is that Player X calls pig, has the lowest hand at the table, but only has the second highest hand at the table. There's no less than three ways to look at it:

1. The pot is split between the highest hand at the table and the second lowest hand at the table. Player X's hand doesn't count at all. The rest of the hands play as though Player X is not even in the showdown.
   
   
2. By process of elimination, the highest hand at the table wins the entire pot. Player X does not win anything because he didn't win both Hi and Lo. However, nobody wins for the Lo hand because Player X's hand was in fact the lowest hand at the table. That in mind and with Player X out of the pot, the whole lot of money goes to the highest hand.
   
   
3. Half of the pot goes to the highest hand at the table. The remaining half is won by nobody since Player X had the lowest hand but did not get the pig. What do you do with half a pot if no player wins it? Why, you leave it in the center of the table for the winner of the next game and pot.

You'll notice in all three examples that Player X won nothing. That much is consistent. If you call pig, then you must win pig to win anything. Any table that would allow Player X to pick up half the pot for having the Lo needs to go back to school. When you call pig, you must get pig, or you get nothing.

Chadd Berwager was the last to post in this thread, and his contribution was the best of all. He gave his table's house rule (which is the first example above), and then remarked that before every home game, the complete house rules are printed out and distributed to each player. Man, what a touch of class. In Chadd's words, "Nothing kills a home game like an argument over a pot." Truer words have never been spoken. I've seen it before and it's always ugly.

How many times have I said it, but this is another one of those things that has no consistent answer. A house rule needs to be in place to determine how the situation is resolved if it comes up. If no house rule is in place, then for the love of God, make sure everybody in the pot has the same interpretation prior to showdown.

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Adapted from HomePoker.com