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Pai Gow | History

Pai-Gow Poker, or double-hand poker, is an Americanized version of Pai Gow, in that Pai Gow Poker is played with playing cards using poker hand rankings while Pai-Gow is played with chinese dominoes.

The pai-gow casino game is played with a standard 52-card deck of cards, plus a single joker. It is played on a table marked with seven betting locations if one of the players serves as "bank"; in a live game where players play against the house, there are only six betting spots.

Pai-Gow Casino Poker cards are shuffled, and then dealt to the table in seven face-down piles of seven cards, with four cards unused, regardless of the number of people playing. Each Pai-Gow round's deal begins on a randomly-selected position on the table, with the hands after the first being dealt to the player's left around the table.

One common way of doing this in Pai-Gow is to roll three six-sided dice, then count betting spots clockwise from the first until the number on the dice is reached; then give that spot the first hand, the next spot the next hand, and so on until all seven hands have been allotted (this is an adaptation of the similar procedure used in Pai Gow). Otherwise, the position is derived from a random-number generator as shown on a display above the dealing apparatus. If there is no bet placed on a particular spot, the hand is still assigned but then placed in the discards with the four unused cards.

Each player on the Pai-Gow Casinogame is playing against the bank, who may be the casino dealer or one of the other players.

The object of the Pai-Gow Casino Poker game is to create two poker hands out of the seven cards in your hand: A five-card poker hand and a two-card poker hand. The five-card hand must rank higher than your two-card hand. The two-card hand is often called the hand "in front", and the five-card hand is called the hand "behind", as they are placed that way in front of the player when he is done setting them. The only two-card hands are one pair and high cards; no straights, flushes, and so on. The joker plays as a bug: that is, in the five-card hand it can be used to complete a straight or flush, if possible; otherwise it is an ace. In the two-card hand, it always plays as an ace. Five-card hands use standard poker hand rankings, with one exception: in most Nevada casinos, the hand A-2-3-4-5 ranks above a king-high straight, but below the ace-high straight A-K-Q-J-10.

If each of your now-separated Pai-Gow hands beats the bank corresponding hand, then you win your bet. If only one of your hands beats the bank, then you push. If both of your hands lose to the bank, then you lose. On each individual Pai-Gow hand, ties go to the bank. This gives the bank a small advantage. If you foul your hand, meaning that your low hand outranks your high hand or that there are an incorrect number of cards in each hand, there will be a penalty, either re-arrangement of the hand according to house rules or forfeiture of the Pai Gow hand.