A Simple Game With One Hard Decision
Almost everything written about pai gow poker is either too simple to be useful or too complicated to be finished. Here is the version that works.
It is a seven-card game. You get seven cards, the house gets seven, and each side splits its seven into two hands: one of five cards and one of two. The two-card hand is ranked as a two-card hand, where aces are high, a pair beats a non-pair, and a suited ace and a suited king is a very different thing from the same two cards offsuit. Each five-card hand is ranked as an ordinary poker hand, with a flush beating a full house. Both hands are compared against the other side, and the best result is two out of two. You win, you lose, or you push.
That is the entire game. There is no betting round after the deal, no decisions about raising, and no second decision point. The one thing you do is decide how to divide seven cards, and then you watch the dealer do the same with theirs.
Why the game feels complicated anyway is that there are 53 cards in it, the joker is wild, and the two-card hand ranks differently from anything else in poker. Add the commission and the seat you are sitting in, and you have four separate things to think about when the only decision is a single split. Our casino table games guide covers the floor context if you are deciding where to start.
The 53-Card Deck and What the Joker Does
The deck is the standard 52 plus one joker, and the joker is wild. It can stand in for any card.
In practice the joker is less powerful than "wild" suggests, because of the rule that keeps it honest: the joker can only be used as one card in your entire holding. If you assign it to the five-card hand, it is no longer available to the two-card hand, and vice versa. This single constraint is the source of most of the interesting decisions in the game.
Three situations come up constantly. First, you get the literal joker as a dealt card, which is rare, roughly once every 53 hands. Second, you do not hold the joker but a wild card is still counted in your seven, and the maths of your hand change because the odds of drawing a particular card are affected by a card you cannot use. Third, you have a joker and a complete hand, in which case it is doing nothing and you should not pretend otherwise.
One more rule worth knowing: the joker cannot be used to make five of a kind in the five-card hand in most jurisdictions, and in some it cannot be used to make a straight or a flush at all. The treatment varies, so the specific table matters. Our online casino checklist covers how to check the rules of a specific game before committing, which is worth two minutes when a table is charging commission.
How to Rank Two Cards Against Two Loose Cards
The two-card hand is ranked separately from the five-card hand, and it has its own ladder. Getting this wrong is the most common source of confusion for new players.
A pair, any pair, beats any non-pair. So a pair of threes beats an ace and a king, which surprises people. Among non-pairs, the highest card wins first, then the kicker, and a suited non-pair beats an offsuit non-pair of the same ranks, because the suited version makes a small straight or a small flush that the opponent cannot match. The suits do not otherwise rank, and the ace is high except in the small straight, where ace to five is the lowest straight, not the highest.
The key idea is that the two-card hand is a different game from the five-card hand and a two-card flush is worth more than a two-card pair. A suited ace and king is a live hand that can beat a king and a queen, even though the raw ranks say the ace is higher. That is why experienced pai gow players build their two-card hand from a suited king or suited queen whenever the five-card hand does not need those cards.
Keep in mind that the two-card hand only counts for half the result. A player who wins the five-card hand and loses the two-card hand ties the round, and a player who loses both loses the full stake. So the two-card hand is not where you build a strong result, it is where you build a floor under a strong five-card hand.
Splitting Seven Cards Into Five and Two
The split is the game. The rest is bookkeeping.
The usual approach starts from the five-card hand, because that is where most of the value is. The house generally plays the way it expects you to play, so a five-card hand built on a pair, a two pair or trips will often be matched. You then need the two-card hand to carry the round, or at least to avoid losing it badly.
There are three broad strategies and they are worth naming.
The standard split puts a five-card hand together that most resembles an ordinary poker hand, and takes a pair or a high card for the two-card hand. This is the default and it is right most of the time.
The house-way defensive split deliberately takes a full house or four of a kind in the five-card hand and then throws the remainder into the two-card hand, accepting a worse pair in exchange for a five-card hand that is very difficult to beat. This wins more rounds when your seven cards are unusually strong and it is worth the deliberate ugliness of the two-card hand.
The aggressive split puts the joker to work building a two-card suited combination, accepting a weaker five-card hand to do it. This is the play that pays a commission, and it is the play that changes with the commission, which is the next section.
The how to play blackjack guide makes the same point in a different game: in both, the optimal line is not the most obvious one, and it is not fixed. It moves with the rules and it moves with the deal.
The Commission, and Why It Changes the Game
Here is the number that matters more than the joker: the commission is a per cent of the win, taken only from the banker side, and it is roughly equivalent to a per cent of the whole action, which is a real cost.
| Rule set | Your position | Commission | Theoretical return to player | House edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No commission | Banker | None | about 98.1% | 1.9% |
| Full commission | Player | None | about 98.1% | 1.9% |
| Full commission | Banker | 5% of the win | about 97.0% | 3.0% |
| Full commission | Banker | 5.3% of the win | about 96.8% | 3.2% |
| Half commission | Banker | Half the win, capped | about 98.6% | 1.4% |
| Half commission, 10% cap | Banker | Capped at 10% of the win | about 98.4% | 1.6% |
| What a player should pick | Player | None | about 98.1% | 1.9% |
Banker Play Against Player Play
This is the part that has a direct effect on your money, and it is where the commission finally appears as a number rather than a percentage.
In pai gow the dealer deals and then plays the banker hand. The question of which seat you occupy is not a formality. When you take the player seat you are the one with the decision and the house takes a commission off the banker. When you take the banker seat the house is making the split for you, which sounds easier until you realise that the house follows a fixed algorithm and that algorithm is well known.
The consequence is straightforward. At a table charging 5 per cent commission, the banker side returns less than the player side at the same stake, because the house is taking a cut of your wins. That is why a player who knows the game and wants to play at a full-commission table should choose the player seat, and why the banker seat only makes sense at a half-commission or no-commission table, where the reduced cost offsets the loss of control.
At a no-commission table the two are close to equivalent and the player seat is still slightly preferable, because you make the decision. The general rule is simple: the more commission, the more the player seat is worth. The loyalty programme guide is worth a look as well, because some operators rebate commission and that changes which seat is the better one.
Settlement, Ties and the Rounding That Costs You Money
Pai gow settles on best of three, and the three possible outcomes are worth spelling out because ties are refunded rather than being a win or a loss.
Win both hands and you collect your stake as profit. Win one and lose one and the round is a push, so your stake returns unchanged. Lose both and you lose the stake. There is no partial payout and no half-win, which is worth remembering when you are calculating how much a session can cost you.
The two-card hand creates ties far more often than the five-card hand does, because there are fewer combinations. Two kings offsuit and two queens offsuit are not equal, but two hands built from the same rank and the same suit are, and that happens regularly. In a full session something like 3 to 4 per cent of rounds push, and on a banker bet a push returns the stake before any commission is applied, so pushes are neutral rather than a small loss.
Now the rounding, which is a genuinely unfair rule and the one most players never notice. Many casinos apply the 5 per cent commission and then round the result to the nearest whole currency unit in the player’s favour, which sounds generous. The problem is that on a small win the rounding works against you: a 10 win with 5 per cent commission should return 10.50, and a table that rounds down returns 10. The effect is tiny per hand but it is a systematic loss, and it is part of why the 5.3 per cent figure exists in the return tables. On larger stakes it disappears, which is another argument for not playing a 2 per cent game at 5 per cent stakes.
Check the specific rules at the specific table, because commission, caps and rounding all vary by operator. Our payment methods guide covers the practical side of getting money in and out, and the RTP guide explains how these return figures are calculated in the first place.
The Variant You Are Probably Actually Playing
Almost nobody plays plain pai gow at a land casino, and the version on the floor is a different game with different numbers.
Fortune Pai Gow Poker adds six bonus cards from a joker and two small cards, which changes the composition of the deck and the hand structure and therefore the return. It is the most common game under the pai gow name and it is not the same game as the basic version most strategy charts are written for. The theoretical return sits a little below the basic game, because the extra cards give the house more ways to build a strong hand.
The practical consequence is that a chart written for basic pai gow will be wrong on a Fortune Pai Gow table, in the same way that a 9/6 video poker chart is wrong on a bonus game. The general principle is the one I keep coming back to across all of casino strategy: the rules set the ceiling and the strategy operates underneath it, so match your chart to the specific game rather than to the family name.
Pai Gow Poker with two jokers exists in some markets and raises the return slightly, because more wild cards give the player more flexibility in the split. If you have a choice and both are charging commission, the two-joker version is marginally better. Online, the live-dealer versions follow the standard rules closely and the RNG versions vary, so it remains worth reading the rules panel. The poker variants guide covers the wider family of table games built on the same hand-ranking system.
Why the Commission Pushes You Toward the Five-Card Hand
Here is the practical consequence of the commission, and it is the one piece of strategy the commission genuinely changes.
Because the house takes a cut of a banker win, a banker bet has a lower break-even. To win money as banker at 5 per cent commission you need to beat the break-even by a larger margin than you would as a player. That makes the marginal, close calls the ones you should decline, and it makes the play the house rarely produces the play you want.
In practice this means two things. As banker with a full commission, be more conservative with weak two-card hands, because a two-card loss does not get recovered. As banker, prefer the standard and defensive splits, because they produce stronger five-card hands and therefore more outright wins, which is what the commission makes valuable. As player, with no commission to pay, you can be more aggressive with the joker and build the two-card suited hand, because you are not paying to do it.
This is worth saying plainly, because the received wisdom in most pai gow material is that the game is about the joker. It is not. The joker is a common situation. The commission is present on every hand.
The Honest Assessment
Pai gow is a 2.7 per cent edge game with a 5 per cent commission, which is worse than blackjack and worse than a full-pay video poker machine, and its skill component is real but thin. It is worth playing if you enjoy it, at a half-commission or no-commission table, in the player seat, and if you are willing to learn the split properly before you stake anything. It is not worth playing at a full-commission table as banker, and the reason is on the table in front of you.
