My question pertains to Pai Gow Poker. I live in NJ and have family that recently re-located to Tampa a few years ago. On my visits I stop in at the Hard Rock Seminole in Tampa. My favorite game is Pai Gow and after playing there the last 5, I just found out that they have modified the hand structure for the game. In Pai Gow Poker, a A-5 straight is the second-best straight behind A-10. My question is, is that even legal? They claim it as a house rule. That’s like changing the order of poker hands (i.e., let’s make 2 pair beat 3-of-a-kind). I was astonished when I heard that.
[Editor’s Note: The following answer was graciously provided by Dan Lubin, author of our book The Essentials of Casino Game Design, a must-read for every serious gambler, table-game aficionado, and advantage player who wants to know how table games really work for the house. Lubin is also known as PaiGowDan, having invented the commission-free Pai Gow Poker game called Fortune Pai Gow, so he’s a natural to respond to this question.]
The original designers of Pai Gow Poker, Sam Torosian and Fred Wolfe of the Bell card club in southern California, tried to make their new house-banked game extra special, to set it more apart from traditional poker, by tacking on some fancy rules.
Unfortunately, they couldn’t differentiate all that well between creating a fantastic new game and simply augmenting an old game (poker) with some whiz-bang changes that added little but confusion.
Such is the case with the ace-high or “Broadway” straight and the ace-low or “Wheel” straight, the first- and second-ranked straights in Pai Gow Poker, as opposed to regular poker, where the ace-low straight (A-2-3-4-5) is the lowest possible straight, losing to all others.
So, this is a legacy gimmick of Pai Gow Poker and yes, it’s 100% legal — given that the final game-play specifications were submitted to and approved by local (typically state) governing authorities, in some cases decades ago.
The mathematical difference between Pai Gow with its second-highest Wheel straight and poker is negligible, and Pai Gow Poker is otherwise a fantastic game and very popular, with about 1,800 installs in the U.S. alone, all the more amazing in the highly changeable casino-pit environment, since it’s around 30 years old.
Also, Pai Gow Poker has remained basically unchanged since its introduction in the 1980s, with only one major improvement: removing the 5% commission in order to streamline the game-play process.
The full account of this development in Pai Gow Poker, along with many other game-design particulars, is described in detail in the book The Essentials of Casino Game Design, written by none other than myself.
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cjen
May-09-2017
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