All About: Pai Gow Poker

image from Flickr

So you've been wandering past the tables time and again. You see those weird dominoes, and you hear the excitement of a cluster of folks leaned close at the table. You stop to watch, but you just have NO idea what on earth is happening. Yep, you're wondering, what in the hell is Pai Gow Poker?

Read on to find out just what Pai Gow Poker is, and get the low down on why its such a fun game to play!

For the truest novice, let us first take a look at what exactly Pai Gow Poker is. Wikipedia does a nice job of laying it out for us:

Pai Gow poker (or Double-hand poker) is an Americanized version of Pai Gow, in that it is played with playing cards using poker hand rankings, while Pai Gow is played with Chinese dominoes. The games of Pai Gow poker and Super Pan-9 were co-created by Sam Torosian and Fred Wolf.

The game is played with a standard 52-card deck plus a single joker. It is played on a table set for six players plus the dealer.

Each player is playing against the banker, who may be the casino dealer or one of the other players at the table.

So.. now we know that its a casino game, with 53 cards, and dominoes, but how does it work?

The object of the game is for a player to create two poker hands out of the seven cards in his hand: a five-card poker hand and a two-card poker hand. The five-card hand must rank higher than the two-card hand. The two-card hand is often called the hand "in front" or "on top", and the five-card hand is called the hand "behind" or "bottom", as they are placed that way in front of the player when he is done setting them.

So, its basically a form of poker? Hey! We know how to play that! What you should next do, is head to that Wikipedia page, and read the actual play details, pay particular attention to the Deal, the Hand Rankings, and Determining a Win.

All read up? Great, so now you get the basics of the game. But you might ask, why should you bother playing it?

Well for starters, Pai Gow is very popular. It usually ranks among the top 10 table games played in casinos. This is largely because of the opportunities for winning that are present. The Casino City Times has an article listing these top ten, and why they are on the list.

Still not convinced?

No problem, lets go visit the Wizard.

On of our favorite sites out there is the Wizard of Odds. He has been showing us the wisdom of probabilities for years now, and his page on Pai Gow is worth taking a gander at. He even lays out a nice strategy for maximizing your profit potential while playing.

Now that you get the idea, head on over to this free Pai Gow Poker site, and play some hands to get the feel of it.

So the next time you walk by that Pai Gow table in your favorite casino, and you tilt your head sideways, hopefully now it won't be in puzzlement about what the game is, but instead it will be your mind telling you how you can play and win.

November 13, 2007

All About: Pai Gow Poker