Pai Gow Poker Review

Rating : 9.7/10

Pai Gow Poker

Ari Waknine

Pai Gow Poker

Pai Gow Poker A lot of skill games in online casinos are based on fast and furious action. Pai Gow Poker, on the other hand, is a strategic game based…

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Member Reviews

Pai Gow Poker

A lot of skill games in online casinos are based on fast and furious action. Pai Gow Poker, on the other hand, is a strategic game based on being patient and picking your spots. This is probably no surprise since it’s based on a Chinese domino game called Pai Gow, and domino games are known for being all about patience. Learning to play this game doesn’t take very long, and the strategies involved have enough depth to keep most players interested. With that having been said, the strategic side of the game is not quite as deep as some other games like blackjack or video poker.

Basic Gameplay for Pai Gow poker

This game uses a 53-card deck that uses a half-wild joker that can be used as an ace or to complete a straight, a flush, a straight flush or a royal flush. You are given seven cards and have to break those cards up into two hands. The low hand uses two cards and is based on pairs and high card hands from poker. The high hand uses five cards and standard poker hand rankings. Your high hand always has to be worth more than your low hand.

Your high and low hands are put up against a dealer who arranges his hand based on that particular casino’s algorithm for doing so. Then your hands are compared. If both of your hands are better than the dealer, you win a bet that pays 1:1 minus a five percent commission, so it basically pays out 95 percent of your bet as a profit when you win. If one wins and one loses, your bet is a push. Obviously, if both hands lose, then you lose your bet. If two individual hands tie (ie: high hands tie or low hands tie), then that hand counts as a loss for the player.

Pai Gow Poker Strategy

Using the correct strategies in this game will allow you to get the house advantage down to as low as about 2.6 percent. Generally speaking, the most common hands to play will be the ones where you have two pair, a single pair or just a high card hand. High card hands are easy to play: Put your second- and third-highest cards in the low hand with the rest in the high hand. Single pairs always go in the high hand, and you’ll put your next two highest cards in the low hand.

Playing two pairs in Pai Gow Poker is common, but it’s also one of the most difficult scenarios to come up. You shouldn’t just automatically split your pairs. You should tend to keep your pairs together in the high hand if the largest pair is still pretty low and if you have high cards left other than your pairs. On the other hand, if you have two high pairs, then you should usually split them up. After you play out a few two pair hands, you’ll start to get a feel for how it works, and your intuitive play will normally be correct.