Pai Gow Poker: Guide to Making Hands

Unlike some of the more traditional games you’ll find at online casinos such as online blackjack or roulette, playing Pai Gow poker can be a bit of an intimidating prospect to the new table games player at a casino. With a little background on how hands tend to play themselves out, however, you can quickly work your way to a reasonable house edge of less than the 5% cut they take from your wins.

In this review of hands, we’ll look at some of the trickier hands that you’ll be splitting up. To start, the dreaded two pair hands that always seem like push hands; if your two pair doesn’t have an ace as one of the other three cards, your best bet is to split the two pair up into the low pair as a two card hand and the high pair as your five card hand. Only with an ace or a third pair in your hand can you consider keeping the two pair together; you’re risking getting swept too often by keeping two pair together and having a crappy two card hand.

Another tricky hand that confuses amateur players is three aces with no other hand. Although there are a lot of potential ways to play the hand, the best and most profitable way to approach the hand is to break the aces into an ace and a high single for your two card hand, and leave the lone pair of aces as your five card hand. This balanced hand gives you the best chance of winning a wager; while making AA your two card hand seems like a smart move, it only allows you a push almost 100% of the time, as ace high rates to be good against a five card hand almost never in this game.