Pai Gow Poker

Seven cards each, split into five behind and two in front — the five must be stronger. Win both hands to be paid; win one and it pushes. A 53rd card, the joker, plays as an ace or completes straights and flushes.

Seven cards, two hands, one split

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Manual

Five behind, two in front.
Seven cards split into a five-card hand and a two-card hand — and the five-card hand must outrank the two-card one.
Win both to be paid.
Beat the dealer’s five and the dealer’s two: even money, less a 5% commission (rounded down here). One hand each is a push; lose both and the stake goes.
Copies go to the dealer.
An exactly tied hand — a copy — counts as the dealer’s. You never win a copied hand.
The joker is half wild.
It plays as an ace, or as whatever completes a straight, a flush or a straight flush. Four aces and the joker are five aces, the highest hand in the game.
The wheel runs second.
A-2-3-4-5 is the second-highest straight here, above K-Q-J-10-9 and below only A-K-Q-J-10.
The front takes pairs or high cards.
Two cards make a pair or they make nothing — no straights, no flushes in front.

The game

Seven cards to you, seven to the dealer, from a 53-card deck — the standard 52 plus one joker. Each side splits its seven into a five-card hand set behind and a two-card hand set in front, and the five-card hand must outrank the two-card one. The dealer’s split follows a fixed public recipe, the house way; yours is the entire game.

Both hands are compared. Win both: even money, less a 5% commission (this table rounds the commission down). Win one: push. Lose both: the stake goes. And an exactly tied hand — a copy — belongs to the dealer, which is where much of the edge quietly lives.

The joker plays as an ace, or as whatever card completes a straight, a flush or a straight flush. Four aces plus the joker make five aces, the best hand in the game. One more oddity: A-2-3-4-5 is the second-highest straight here, above the king-high one.

The numbers

Played house way against house way, the game gives up about 2.84% of the stake per hand — the published figure, and the one this table measures live on the pre-deal ledger. Nearly 41.5% of all hands push: this is the slowest-bleeding table in the lobby, which is exactly its reputation.

The edge has two parts. The commission takes 5% of every full win — about 1.4% of stake per hand. The copies supply most of the rest: every exact tie, front or back, is scored for the dealer.

Choosing your own split instead of mimicking the house way claws back only about 0.3%: the house way is nearly optimal. The ledger prices all 21 legal fronts against the same sampled dealer draws, so the rare hands where the house way is NOT the best split are exactly the ones worth studying.

Setting the hand

With no pair: highest card behind, next two in front — the front can never hold more than a pair, so give it the best two cards the back can spare.

One pair: the pair stays behind, the two best spares go in front. Two pair: split them, lower pair in front — unless a lone ace can lead the front, in which case both pairs may stay behind. Three pair: the highest pair always goes up front.

Straights, flushes and straight flushes play behind, spares in front — the joker counts toward them. A full house splits: trips behind, the pair in front; a strong back hand behind a dead front mostly just pushes.

Quads split by rank: small ones (up to 6s) stay whole, big ones (jacks up) split into pair and pair, the middle stays whole only when an ace can guard the front. Five aces split — aces behind, aces in front — unless a pair of kings holds the front instead.

Tactics

The two-card hand decides most sessions. A strong back behind a hopeless front is the classic beginner’s set: it wins one hand, loses the other, and pushes forever. Push the strength forward whenever the back stays credible.

Respect the copies. Front hands like K-x and Q-x are copied far more often than pairs are; on close choices the ± between two splits is smaller than the copy traffic they attract.

In training, the glimpse cheat turns over one of the dealer’s seven and reprices every split conditioned on it. At a gold table the same glimpse exists only while the Sharp eyes event is running.

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