History of Pai-Gow

The game of Pai Gow Poker is also known as double-hand poker and was created by the team of Sam Torosian and Fred Wolf, in the 1900’s. They worked together to create a modern poker variation game using playing cards instead of the domino type cards. Fred Wolf started featuring the Pai Gow Poker game in his own California casino and the game became an instant hit. It spread rapidly out to the Las Vegas and to the Atlantic City casinos.

Tracing its roots to ancient Chinese gaming, Pai Gow is literally translated as make nine. It is a Chinese game believed to be thousands of years old, and played with Chinese domino tile sets. The beauty of Pai Gow has attracted the curiosity of gaming audiences in cities such as Nevada and California.

In ancient Chinese, the translation of Pai Gow is a term designated both for cards and dominoes. The reason for the use on both objects is that there is no main difference between dominoes and cards in China. During the early Chinese are precisely used as cards. Dominoes are packed and treated the same way as cards.

The original version of Pai Gow used special dominos and dice. It is said to be a rather complicated game, played slow enough to serve as a social event and is rarely seen in gaming houses outside of Asia.

The modern, westernized version is played with a deck of 53 cards plus a Joker and uses poker-like hands for ranking. It is still a complex game but the changes make it more approachable as indicated by its success in casinos throughout the world. It stills, however, a rather slow game often resulting in ties.

One of the major changes that occurred when the Chinese game of Pai Gow transitioned into the American game of Pai Gow Poker was its transformation from a domino game to a card game. In China, you can still find the domino game of Pai Gow played regularly. In the American version of the game, the basic poker hand applies and one joker is added to the deck. As in blackjack, the players play against the dealer, not against each other. The maximum number of players at a Pai Gow poker table is six, plus the dealer, making seven players.

The game is a unique version of poker in that the player uses all of the cards to create two separate poker hands. Each player receives seven cards, which the player must split up to form a high hand of five cards and a low hand of two cards. The player wins the Pai Gow Poker game if both of the hands outscore both of the dealer’s hands. If only one of the player’s hands beats the dealer’s corresponding hand, the game is a tie.

When Pai Gow Poker went online, the online casinos added an addition twist to make the game more interesting. They called it the bonus bet. The bonus bet is won by looking at the player’s entire seven-card hand. This part of the game is not played against the dealer, but is based solely on the value of the player’s hand pursuant to the standard ranking of winning poker hands. A straight or better will win the bonus bet and will pay out according to the posted payout table.

The ancient Chinese game of Pai Gow has thus metamorphosed into the modern Internet game of online Bonus Pai Gow Poker. Bonus Pai Gow Poker is easily learned and exciting to play, and is quickly becoming one of the most popular poker variations in cyberspace gambling. Today, Pai Gow is played very similar to many existing card games and the main difference is that domino tiles are used instead of cards. There is no doubt about it those who learn to begin to play Pai Gow often en up becoming more than enthusiastic about the game and realize the beauty and ease in playing this popular Chinese game.

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