Pai Gow Poker Basic Strategies for Beginning Players

Published: April 17, 2014

Pai Gow Poker is a complicated game with a lot of pitfalls that beginners can fall into. We want to help you with getting started with this game by giving you some basic strategies to follow that will help you to play the most common scenarios well. We are going to assume that you know the rules of the game and what the high and low hands are. With that having been said, let's get started.

The two most common scenarios are playing with a high card hand or a single pair. Both of these situations follow a simple formula if you want to play perfectly. With a high card hand, you put your second and third highest cards in the low every single time. With a single pair hand, your low hand will consist of the two largest cards in your hand that are not paired. That's all you need to know for those two types of hands.

Playing two pair is pretty tricky, and it's all about deciding to split the pairs or not by putting the lowest pair in the low hand. The value of your pairs and the best high-card hand you can make if you don't split them are the information you need here. Add together the value of your pairs by adding their ranks. For example, jacks over eights would be 11+8 for a total of 19. If your total is at least, then you should split your pairs no matter what. With anywhere between 12 and 16 points, split if you don't have an unpaired ace in your hand. With point totals of 11 or lower, split if you don't have an unpaired king or ace in your hand. This will have you playing well with these tricky hands.

If you end up with three different pairs in your hand, then you should play the highest one in the low hand. With three of a kind, you're almost always going to play it like a single pair where your best two unpaired cards are moved to the low. However, if you have three aces, then you will play a pair of aces in the high hand and ace high in the low hand. This covers all of the common hands, and though you might have some situations come up that fall outside of these recommendations, they will be few and far between.