The History of Pai Gow Poker

by Bodog Casino | Jan 2 2009

If you want to know the complete history of Pai Gow Poker and not just the Coles Notes version, you have to go back to the game of Pai Gow… just Pai Gow, no “Poker”.

You see, before American casino owner Fred Wolf added the “Poker” side of the game in the 1980s it was an ancient game exclusively owned by the Chinese. Pai Gow, basically a game of Chinese dominoes, dates back to the Song Dynasty. We’re talking year 960.

Pai Gow basically means “make nine” which fits the original game as other than a few high-scoring exceptions the best hand you can score is a nine. The way the game works is that dominoes are randomized on the table, stacked into eight stacks of four tiles, and, after some shuffling ritual, each player (including the dealer) gets four tiles to make two hands of two tiles each. The hand with the lower value is called the front hand, and the hand with the higher value is called the rear hand. If a player's front hand beats the dealer's front hand, and the player's rear hand beats the dealer's rear hand, then that player wins the bet. If a player's front and rear hands both lose to the dealer's hands, the player loses the bet. If one hand wins and the other loses, it’s a push, and the player gets back the money they bet. It sounds more difficult then it actually is. Oddly enough the game takes forever to play because 41 percent of the hands tend to end as a push.

This version of the game actually made it over to the U.S. in the 1800s. However, Wolf took this concept and morphed it into a card game in order to offer more variety in his California Casino. In his version instead of making two hands of two tiles, the object of the game is to make two poker hands out of the seven cards in their hand. One hand has to be a five-card poker hand and the other must be a two-card poker hand. And the five-card hand must be a higher hand than the two-card hand.

Once Wolf had the poker remix and its rules established in his Cali casino the game eventually caught on in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. It spread because the house advantage for the game was pretty low - less than 3 percent. Plus, with the amount of pushes that go down Pai Gow Poker it’s a great way to stretch your dollar.

The game has steadily become more mainstream since the 90s because sites like the Bodog Casino started offering the game online.