More or Less Rules

More or Less was contributed to pagat.com by Les Stanwood. It is a seven-card stud lowball game using ace-to-five low rankings, as in razz.

The game uses a standard 52-card deck with no wild cards. Each player makes the lowest five-card hand they can from their seven cards.

Under ace-to-five ranking, aces are low, and straights and flushes do not count against a hand.

Picture cards. Every king, queen and jack counts as zero. Zeros rank below aces. Zeros never form pairs: two kings, or a king and a queen, count simply as two zeros.

Antes and betting limits are set by the house or the dealer. The deal and betting rounds are as in seven-card stud.

The source does not fix who opens each betting round. The dealer shall announce this before the deal. Remember that a face-up picture card is the lowest card showing, not the highest.

Hands without a pair beat hands with a pair. Two hands without a pair are compared by their highest card first, then the next highest, and so on. A zero is lower than any other card.

A hand with fewer picture cards is not necessarily worse. What matters is the highest-ranking card that is not a zero. For example, K-Q-J-10-9 is a ten-high hand, so it loses to 8-7-6-4-3, an eight-high hand.

When two hands are equal down to the last card that is not a zero, the hand with a zero where the other has an ace or higher card wins. So 7-4-3-Q-J beats 7-4-3-A-K, because after the 7, 4 and 3 it has two zeros against an ace and a zero.

The best possible hand is five picture cards, which counts as 0-0-0-0-0.

After the final betting round, the remaining players show their hands. The lowest five-card hand wins the pot. If two hands are exactly equal, the pot is split.

The same zero rule for picture cards may be added to other lowball games. It is offered as a variation of Riding Ramone, for example.