How to Get Started in Pai Gow Poker Quickly and Easily

Published: February 13, 2014

Pai Gow Poker is a seven-card poker game where you're having to break up your cards into two hands. The high hand uses five cards and has to be higher than the low hand which uses two cards. The low hand only uses pairs and high card hands, so you don't have to worry about two-card straights and flushes or anything like that. You have to try to maximize your chances of winning both hands in this game while sticking to the restraint that the high hand has to be better than the low hands.

You can break up Pai Gow Poker hands into your options for your high card hand. For example, with no pairs and no big hands like flushes or straights, you have just a plain high card hand. The right strategy for these hands is to put your cards in order from highest to lowest and put your second and third highest cards into your low hand. If you have exactly one pair, then you keep the pair in your high hand and put your two highest cards that are left over in the low hand.

Two pair hands are a little tricky because a single pair in your low hand is very strong. If you can put ace-high in your low hand without moving a pair to your low hand, then you should usually just keep the two pair in your high hand and go with your next two highest cards in your low hand. However, if you can't put a very strong card in your low hand, then you should usually split your pairs with the highest in the high high and the lowest in the low hand.

With three of a kind or better, you're almost always going to put the strongest hand in your high hand since it's almost a guaranteed lock to win with the best possible remaining two cards for the low. However, sometimes this isn't the case. For example, you might have a flush and two pair at the same time, and if you keep the flush, the two cards left over are very low like 6 and 4. In this case, you would skip the flush and put the two pair in your high hand with stronger cards in your low hand to maximize your chances of winning both the high and the low.