Category: Pai Gow Poker

Boss Media casinos offer multi-player Pai Gow Poker with player banking.

Pai Gow Poker

At Boss Media casinos the player gets chance to be the banker, which gives them the best odds online. As the banker, you have the advantage of winning any copy hands, just like the dealer.

The turn to be banker alternates between the players and the dealer, the dealer banking every other hand. If a player declines to bank or there is nobody in a seat the banker will revert to the dealer.

There are five player positions at the table. So the player will have a chance to bank once every 10 hands.

As banker in a one on one game the house edge is 0.08%. The more other players there are the less the house edge as banker. While not banking the house edge is 2.85%

In a one on one game the average house edge is 2.57%. Your winnings will be charged a 5% commission by the house.

Betting limits: $1-1000

You can select a table with your preferred bet limits: €5-100, €25-500, or €50-1,000.

The wild card, or joker, may be used only as a single ace or to complete a flush, straight, or a straight flush.

There is no side bet on this game.

Boss Media Pai Gow Poker works like this

• Opt for “house way” and your cards will automatically be set for you by the dealer using the same rules employed by the casino.
• Multi-player gaming means up to 5 players can join the same game and chat with one another.
• You have the option to open a reserved table, and select the players you’d like to join.
• A different screen perspective is shown from every seat at the table.
• You can observe a game without joining.
• Play for free in Practice mode with no real money involved.

Pai Gow Poker is a modern game with ancient origins. Based on the ancient Chinese domino game and the modern American version of poker, Pai Gow poker combines the east with the west in a great game for beginning level players.

Pai Gow Poker is a poker game that pits the player against the dealer, unlike most other poker games that players play against other players. By playing against the dealer, beginning players don’t have to worry about other, more experienced people taking their money.

Another Pai Gow advantage is the relatively slow game play, novices can take their time and strategize without needing to make hasty decisions. It’s also easier to play for a long time with just a little bit of money since, to lose, both of your hands must be lower than both of the dealer’s hands.

Pai Gow is played with 53 cards; the regular 52-card standard deck and one joker. The player is dealt seven cards face up and the dealer receives seven cards face down.

A five card hand and a two card hand must be made from the seven cards, the five card hand must be higher than the two card hand. To win, a player needs both of his hand values to be higher than the dealer’s.

To read more about Pai Gow Poker rules and strategy, browse the game tips and strategy pages.

A survey by Mintel Market Research shows that the British are great fans of poker, both online and land-based. According to the survey, one in four British adults (or about 7 million) has played poker in the last year. The participants in the survey point out various reasons for this new hobby, ranging from fun and entertainment to choosing poker as a source for additional income.

Since September 1, UK pubs have been permitted to host poker games, providing individual stakes are not bigger than £5, and total stakes amount to no more than £100 a day. For the real fans of poker, however, online casinos are still a preferred venue, since they do not have similar restrictions on bets and, unlike pubs, offer customer services more comparable to land-based casinos. Moreover, online casinos are able to offer a wide range of poker games – a feature widely favoured by modern gamblers.

One casino that has done much to cater to this rising interest in online poker is Red Lounge Casino (redloungecasino.com), which is powered by Cantor Gaming. Red Lounge has lately enjoyed the status of one being of the most popular online casinos in the UK, partly because of the variety and quality of its online poker offerings. The poker games available at Red Lounge range from the familiar varieties to the more exotic, such as Pai Gow Poker, Caribbean Poker, and Let Them Ride Poker.

Pai Gow Poker

Pai Gow Poker is a casino poker variation which combines classic American poker with an ancient Chinese domino game. The result is an intriguing new game with fascinating strategy and some of the best odds available anywhere – the commission when player is “banker” is only 5%.

Caribbean Poker is a popular variation on poker that offers exciting, fast-paced play and high payouts. And Red Lounge Casino offers some of the best odds on Caribbean Poker available at any online casino, paying 250 to 1 on Royal Flush. Red Lounge Caribbean Poker also features the possibility for the dealer to expose their cards if the player surrenders, which eliminates the wondering about whether surrendering was the right option. There is also an added feature of a £1 side bet on the Progressive Jackpot.

Let Them Ride Poker is a online casino poker game which features simple yet compelling gameplay with massive payouts: up to £50,000 per hand.

Apart from its wide range of customer-tailored game varieties, Red Lounge Casino pays special attention to customer care in response to online gamblers’ growing awareness of customer service and their demand for new features.

The casino has a highly efficient London-based customer service team which provides prompt responses to client enquiries by live chat, phone, or e-mail. It also offers many promotions, targeted at the specific needs of different groups of customers. The newest of these is the 15% daily rebate promotion, which provides players with the opportunity to receive a proportion of the amounts they have lost as often as 30 times during the month of November.

As these examples illustrate, casino poker fans in the UK are very well served by online casino poker games, many of which offer features and payouts that live venues cannot match.

House Way in Pai Gow Poker

Pai Gow Poker is an unusual game in many aspects, but none more so than in the House Way button. In online Pai Gow Poker, the House Way automatically allows the player to set his hands exactly the way the casino would.

You might think this gives you a unique opportunity to win – if I’m playing exactly as the casino does, you might say, I must have the advantage. It’s a fair point. But it’s completely wrong.

The reason why this is wrong is all to do with the House Edge. The house edge, in simple terms, is the percentage of the money bet in a casino that the casino expects to keep. It varies by game and by bet – for example, the house edge in Blackjack can be as low as 0.6%, whereas in Keno it can be as high as 90%. If the house edge was 0, the player would always win. If it was 100, the player would always lose. As a rule, the closer the house edge is to 0, the better the player’s chances.

The house edge

Casinos stay in business because of the house edge. For games such as Baccarat, where the house edge is around 1.5%, the casino knows that in many cases, players will walk away with a profit. But behind the scenes, working away relentlessly like a money-making machine, is the house edge.

As time goes on, regardless of short term gains and losses, the amount of money the casino makes starts to approach 1.5%. This may not seem a lot, but 1.5% of 1,000,000 is still 15,000. Multiply this by every game and every table and you’ll see why the casinos are such extravagant establishments.

So what does this have to do with Pai Gow Poker? Everything! Because the house edge ensures that the casino will win in the long term, the House Way button is not designed to win every game, but to minimise losses. It’s like the casino’s patient servant, lulling the player into a false sense of security, whilst slowly, gently, picking his pocket!

Should Pai Gow Poker fans ignore the House Way button? Not at all. If you know what you’re doing, it can be an important weapon in your winning strategy.

Strategies to win

At the Casinos Guide, we describe three strategies for winning at Pai Gow Poker, suited to either low, medium or higher-risk punters. These strategies involve the use of four separate elements; a basic rule to set your hands (suitable for most hands you’re dealt), more advanced rules for less common hands, the bonus bet and, of course, the House Way button.

Understanding these on their own and in combination with each other is the path to winning at Pai Gow Poker.

If you’re new to the game, the House Way button can give you an insight into the way the casino minimises its losses. But always remember that, to win, the House Way needs the House edge – and that is never on your side!

If you think you’d like to try Pai Gow Poker, but are unsure of the rules, come on over to our Odds, rules and strategies site. And if you don’t know your flush from your full house, don’t worry – we have a handy Poker Hand Ranks reference table there too!

Once each player has set their hand, then they can compare their hand to the dealer’s hands. If a player has one hand higher and one hand lower than the dealer’s hands, then they push the bet that they made before the cards were dealt. If a player has both hands higher than the dealer’s hands, then they win their bet. If the player has both hands lower than the dealer’s hands, then they lose their bet.

The only caveat to this general way of scoring is that tied hands go to the dealer, so that the house edge is present in that way. The house edge is also present in the house taking a small commission out of each pot, so they do have an edge in the long run when it comes to playing Pai Gow Poker.

General Strategy in Pai Gow Poker

There are a number of different strategy points that a person should learn if they want to play Pai Gow Poker at the highest levels, but for the most part the optimal Pai Gow Poker strategy can be approximated quite well by doing one of two things.

The first of those things, in the case of most casinos, would be to ask the dealer to set your hands according to the house way. The house way is the strategy that the dealer is required to employ in order to set their own hand and if you set your hand in that way then you are going to be using the same strategy as the dealer. Since most house way strategies are quite close to optimal, you can play the optimal strategy simply by asking the dealer to set your hands for you.

Your second choice would be to go for the highest lower hand that you could possibly make. Not only are you limited by the fact that you only have two cards, but you are also limited by the fact that the five card hand has to be of a higher value than the two card hand. If you accidentally mess this up, then you end up losing your bet automatically, so it is quite critical that you remember that the five card hand needs to have a higher poker hand value. However, if you aim at setting the two card hand as high as you legally are allowed to do, then once again you are approximating a close-to-optimal strategy in the way that you select your hands.

If you employ one of these two strategies (house way or highest two-card hand possible), then you will be off to a running start and severely reduce your learning curve when it comes to Pai Gow Poker.