Instructive Pai Gow Poker Hands for Novice Players

Published: July 10, 2014

When you're a beginner at any type of game that includes a high degree of skill, then it's a very important time for building fundamentals and setting up the foundation for more advanced ideas and concepts that will come later on. If you build a strong foundation, then you'll be in a better position to maximize your payout rates on any game because you'll be more likely to get the advanced tactics sooner rather than later. Here we're going to offer you a foundation for playing Pai Gow Poker, one of the more skill-intensive games found in online casinos.

One of the first skills you have to learn that most new players struggle with is that making the best high hand isn't the objective. Instead, you're trying to increase your chances of winning both hands, and those are usually competing objectives that give novices some problems. For example, suppose you have AAAT874 with no flush. If you play AAA74 in the high with T8 in the low, then you're almost always going to lose the low. If the dealer has a straight or a flush, then you're going to be done. You're basically hoping for a tie in this type of situation.

However, there is another way to play by putting ace-high in the low. Now you'll have AA874 in the high with AT in the low. Your low and high hands are both fairly strong here, and each will likely win more than half the time. This is how you turn a good situation into an even better one by being smart about how you break up your hand and which objectives you pay attention to.

Here's another fun example. Suppose you have KK55AQ4, one of those difficult two pair hands. Your options are KK554/AQ or KKAQ4/55, and both of them can look like good ways to go. The "distance" between KK554 and KKAQ4 is larger than the "distance" between AQ and 55, and that means that you gain more by keeping your two pair than you lose by dropping your 55 down to AQ. This is the way to think about these types of hands where two different ways of playing it are good since you're maximizing the relative value of the hands that are involved. Overall, this approach is the right way for new players to learn how to play Pai Gow Poker.