I am not able to pair the Hue bridge under OpenHAB 1.8.3 with the new pairing method (never tried it with the old because the Hue bridge is brand new). For more details see the discussion on openHAB 1.8.3 is now available
It seems that the update of the hue binding to be compatible with the latest firmware was not included in 1.8.3, even though stated in the release notes. See this post for more information.
You could try to use the latest nightly build of the binding (1.9.0 snapshot) instead.