Pai Gow Poker Strategy Hand-by-Hand

Published: June 5, 2014

Players who start off in pai gow poker quickly realize that there's more strategy to the game than meets the eye. Different types of starting hands have to be categorized to figure out the best way to play groups of hands, and that's exactly what we want to give you here. We're going to quickly give you ways to play the most common types of hands. Not only will this help you to play perfectly most of the time, but it will also give you ideas on how to handle the minority of hands that aren't so easy to learn to play.

Start with a high card hand. Put the second and third-highest cards in the low hand with everything else in the high hand. This is the perfect way to play every single time, and you're basically maximizing the value of your low hand while keeping it worse than the high hand. With a single pair, the idea is the same. Always keep the single pair in your high hand with the next two highest cards in the low hand. Easy enough to learn, and you can already see a pattern emerging.

The same thing happens with three of a kind hands with one exception. If you have three of a kind in kings or lower, then put the trips in your top hand and the next two highest cards in your low hand. However, if you have three of a kind in aces, then you'll want to move one of those aces to your low hand. This will give you a pair of aces in the high with ace-high in the low which is a strong hand overall. This happens because the strength you gain from putting ace high in the low is larger than the strength you lose from moving your high down from three of a kind in aces to a pair of aces.

Two pair hands are bit tricky and require some study to play perfectly. Generally speaking, you're deciding whether you should split the pairs among the high and low hands or if you should keep them both in the high. If you have ace-high to put in the low without splitting a pair, then you should keep both pairs in the high. However, other cases are not so easy to generalize, so you should look into that since they're the most difficult common hands to play.