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Pai-Gow: How the Cards are Dealt

Pai-Gow or Asian poker is an interesting casino game to learn. The one you see in casinos is already an Americanized version of the original game. In the original game, tiles like those in dominoes are used and not paper or plastic playing cards. There are similarities and differences between standard poker and this type of poker. Discover them in the next paragraphs as you learn to play this game.

Pai-Gow was first played in California where it soon drew a crowd. This game can have as much as seven players and only seven players at most. The way cards are dealt will explain this. But before that, cards have to be shuffled. The shuffling is done by the dealer then a selected player does the cutting. A player cuts the deck by dividing it into two parts.

Now for the dealing of cards, the dealer completes the seven hands composed of seven cards in front of him. The four cards remaining are turned face up near the dealer's stack of chips. When he is through segregating the cards, a player is picked to roll the dice to decide who gets the first hand. If the dice totals to 1, 8 and 15, it is the dealer who gets the first hand. Then the player to his right will get the second hand. The getting of the other hands proceeds counter-clockwise starting with the third player.

When the dice roll totals to 2, 9 or 16, the first player to the right gets the first hand then the second hand goes to the second player and so on. If the roll totals to 3, 10 or 17, it would be the second player from the right who gets the first set of cards.

If there are less than seven players, the absent players are still handed cards and the dice roll still applies.

The goal in Pai-Gow is to beat the dealer's two poker hands. If only one of the player's hands wins over the dealer's hand, no exchange of poker chips happen.

In Pai-Gow, you are given seven cards of which you are to form two poker hands. One hand is made up of two cards while the other card is of five cards.

To win in Pai-Gow, just like poker, is to have the highest-ranking hands. But in Pai-Gow, you have two hands. When standard poker is about beating each other player, in Pai-Gow it is beating the dealer's hand. Another difference Pai-Gow has over standard poker is how cards are dealt. It is a bit complex.