Pai Gow Poker – Rules, Strategy & House Edge

Rules

• Players and dealer each receive 7 cards. They must form a 5-card high hand and a 2-card low hand.
• The high hand must outrank the low hand (e.g., a pair of Kings cannot be placed in the low hand if the high hand is weaker).
• The dealer sets hands according to a predetermined house way. Players can request help or guidance to avoid fouls.
• Outcomes:
  • Win both hands → Player wins.
  • Split (win one, lose one) → Push.
  • Lose both hands → Dealer wins.
• The Joker is semi-wild: it acts as an Ace or can complete a straight/flush.

Strategy Basics

• Balance your hands: Don’t leave the low hand too weak; aim for two competitive hands.
• Pairs: Usually keep pairs in the high hand, unless splitting strengthens both hands.
• Two pairs: Often split between high and low unless small pairs with strong kickers.
• Trips: Keep in the high hand; send strongest two kickers to the low, except Aces (house way may split).
• Bankroll: Pushes are common (~40% of hands), so swings are slower than games like blackjack.

Common Setting Patterns

• One pair: Keep in high; strongest side cards in low.
• Two pair: Split unless both are small and kickers are strong.
• Full house: Break into trips + pair (trips high, pair low).
• Straights/flushes: Usually keep intact unless splitting strengthens low significantly.

Why this figure is attributed rather than computed

Pai Gow Poker resists enumeration for a different reason than Ultimate Texas Hold'em. The arithmetic is not the obstacle - seven cards from a 53-card pack is a large but finite number of hands. The obstacle is that the answer depends on a rule set that is not universal. Every hand has to be split into a high hand and a low hand by the house way, and the house way is the casino's own document: they differ between properties, and the edge moves with them. Add the 5% commission and the rotating bank, and the figure becomes a property of the table rather than of the game.

That is the same reason keno is published here as a pay table rather than as a game, and the reason slots carries no figure at all. Where the inputs are the operator's rather than the deck's, a computed number would be a guess with a decimal point on it.

Why the house way decides the figure

Most table games on this site carry a figure computed from the cards. Pai gow poker, like the main bets of Ultimate Texas Hold'em and Caribbean Stud, does not, and here the reason is the house way.

The cost of the game depends on how both hands are set, and the dealer sets theirs by a fixed house procedure that differs between casinos. Your own seven cards can be split into a five-card and a two-card hand in many ways, the joker is semi-wild, and the comparison is against a dealer hand drawn from the cards you did not get. Deriving an edge therefore means solving a two-sided game with a house-specific rule book, not counting a distribution. Published figures, such as the 2.72% above, come from the publisher's own analysis rather than from this site's engines, and this site does not present them as though they were computed here.

Two things about the game are worth more than a quoted number anyway. Roughly two hands in five push, because winning one hand and losing the other returns your stake, which makes pai gow the slowest bankroll burn on a casino floor at the same stake. And the commission on winning hands, usually 5%, is the same mechanism that prices the baccarat banker bet at 1.06%. Here it supplies about half the margin, 1.46 of the 2.72 points in the analysis quoted above; the dealer winning the copies supplies the rest.

Corrected on 19 October 2026: this page gave ~2.8% and two of its sections disagreed on whether it publishes a figure. The quoted figure is 2.72% (Wizard of Odds, setting hands the house way against the dealer's bank; 2.51% with optimal setting), and it is attributed, not computed here.

Where this site can compute, it does: see Three Card Poker, derived across all 22,100 hands, and how the figures are made.