© 2026 Ninefold Ventures LLC, d/b/a 6-Lab. All rights reserved.
© 2026 Ninefold Ventures LLC, d/b/a 6-Lab. All rights reserved.
Pai Gow Poker's house edge shifts with rules variations most players never check. This preview shows the table and the basics; members get the specific numbers.
Games, paytables, and promotions change over time. This guide reflects information last updated July 18, 2026. Always verify current conditions yourself before you play.
Pai Gow Poker is a table game invented in 1985 by Sam Torosian at the Bell Card Club in Southern California, blending the centuries-old Chinese tile game Pai Gow with American poker hand rankings. Each player is dealt seven cards from a 52-card deck plus one joker, then splits them into a five-card hand and a two-card hand, trying to beat the dealer's (or banker's) equivalent hands with both. It's a slower-paced, lower-variance alternative to standard poker or blackjack, and one of the few table games where a seated player can choose to act as the bank against everyone else.
Pai Gow Poker's history is well documented: Sam Torosian, who ran the Bell Card Club in Los Angeles, created the game in 1985 after a Filipino customer introduced him to Pusoy, another card game built around splitting a hand. Torosian reasoned that a simplified, two-hand version using just seven cards would be quicker and easier for players to pick up than traditional poker. The game spread to the Las Vegas Strip by the late 1980s and is now a fixture in casinos worldwide -- though Torosian himself never patented it.
Each player is dealt seven cards from a standard 52-card deck plus a single joker. From those seven, players arrange two separate hands: a five-card hand and a two-card hand, with the rule that the five-card hand must rank higher than the two-card hand. The joker is a limited wild -- in the five-card hand it can complete a straight or flush, and otherwise counts as an ace; in the two-card hand, it almost always plays as an ace outright (a handful of Southern California casinos are an exception, letting it go fully wild there). To win, both of a player's hands need to beat the corresponding hands held by the banker; if only one hand wins, the round is a push rather than a win or loss.
One of Pai Gow Poker's more distinctive features is that the house isn't always the only bank. Depending on the casino, a seated player can choose to act as banker for a round, covering the other players' bets and collecting from anyone who loses -- a role most commonly still held by the dealer, but rotated to players at many tables, especially in California card rooms. Winning bets are typically paid at even money, minus a standard 5% commission to the house.
Pai Gow Poker carries a house edge in the neighborhood of 2.7% to 2.8% for a standard hand, on the higher side compared to blackjack but still modest next to many slot machines. The game also has a well-known hand-ranking quirk: the "wheel" (Ace-2-3-4-5) is treated as the second-highest possible straight at most casinos, just below A-K-Q-J-10, even though it would rank as the lowest straight in regular poker -- except in California and Michigan, where it keeps its usual low ranking. A Face-Up variant, where the dealer's hand is revealed before players set their own, runs a slightly lower house edge, around 1.8%.
More games you can identify the same way, from a single photo.