Question of the Day - 07 October 2024

You're right that the Chinese dominoes game of pai gow is ancient. The first recorded mention of it dates as far back as 960, which makes it well over 1,000 years old. 

Pai gow poker, as you also surmise, was invented a millennium more recently, in 1985, by Sam Torosian.

Sam was the owner of the Bell Card Club -- a card room no longer in business -- in California. Torosian had invested heavily ($750,000) in the card room, but there was barely enough traffic to keep the doors open. And he wasn't alone. A summit meeting of southern California card-room owners was convened at the Bicycle Club a few months earlier and it was determined that new games were needed. By law, they could offer only draw poker, low-ball, and panguingue ("pan") back then. Rather than wait for the legislature to approve additional games, Torosian took the initiative.

One of his customers mentioned a Chinese game called puy soy. In it, 13 cards were dealt, then divided into three hands, similar to the way pai gow tiles is played. That sounded too slow for Torosian, so he devised a variant using seven cards, divided into one poker hand of five cards and one of two. The joker was also in play, functioning as a wild card in a straight or flush or as an ace. A player who could beat the banker’s two hands would win. But he adopted the name pai gow, to interest his Asian clientele, and based it on poker hands, to interest his poker clientele. 

Some skeptics say Torosian came up with a game that had long been played in the gambling dens of New York’s Chinatown, but no one ever came forward to challenge his claim to fame.

"With any game, there are always roots of dispute. Some people emphatically say he did it and others say it was already out there," the general manager of Mikohn Gaming, now also defunct, told the Los Angeles Times. "But [Torosian] is the only guy we can actually pinpoint that is directly attributable to this game. At a minimum, he built the market and visibility."

Regardless of its originality, Torosian had a hit on his hands, going from two pai pow tables the night the game launched to 30 in the space of a week. There was so much demand for pai gow poker that Torosian was adding tables in hallways and next to the restrooms. Other California card clubs, notably the Bicycle Club, were quick to adopt it.

From what we understand, at the time, California rules stated that the house couldn't bank any game; it could only take a cut from the pots or charge by the hour for table use, neither of which paid the bills. Part of pai gow poker's popularity stemmed from the fact that the players took turns banking the game and an entire industry grew up around that. 

In addition, its low house edge contributed to its fast acceptance. Pai gow poker also contained a quirk whereby a hand known as "the wheel" (ace, two, three, four, five) was the second-highest straight. "Some casinos have dropped this ridiculous rule, but most still cling to it," reports Michael "Wizard of Odds" Shackleford.

Pai gow poker arrived in Las Vegas in 1986, one year after its invention by Torosian. Here, too, it quickly caught fire and it has been a popular game ever since.

The sad postscript to the story is that Torosian never saw a dime off his invention. He was the victim of bad legal advice, when a lawyer told him that a game predicated on a 52-card deck (in this case, 53 with the joker) couldn't be patented. Torosian got the same bum steer from poker expert Michael Caro, further disheartening him. Consequently, Torosian didn’t try to claim ownership of pai gow poker. And when other card rooms – and eventually big casinos – started picking up the game and profiting from it, all Torosian could do was read ‘em and weep as Caribbean Stud Poker, Let It Ride, no-bust blackjack, and even variations on his own game were patented. (In the Huntington Press house style, we use upper case for patented games, such as Let It Ride and Three Card Poker, and lower case for public-domain games, such as blackjack and pai gow poker. Just in case you were wondering.)

"Demoralized and battered by debts and partner disputes, Torosian eventually closed his club," reported the Times. With casino-game inventors earning their royalties based on the number of "installs," or tables offering their game, the conservative estimate is that Torosian could have earned $70,000 a month from a patent and might even have been worth $100 million by the turn of the 21st century.

Instead, casinos and card rooms -- not only in the U.S., but globally -- are making a bundle off pai gow poker, free and clear of any royalties to the guy who made it happen.