Pai Gow
Encyclopedia
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
gambling
Gambling
Gambling is the wagering of money or something of material value on an event with an uncertain outcome with the primary intent of winning additional money and/or material goods...
game
Game
A game is structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements...
, played with a set of Chinese dominoes
Chinese dominoes
Chinese dominoes are used in several tile-based games, namely, Tien Gow, Pai Gow, Che Deng, Tiu U and Kap Tai Shap. In Cantonese they are called 骨牌 "Gwat Pai", which literally means "bone tiles", it is also the name of a northern Chinese game, where the rules are quite different from the southern...
. Pai gow is played in unsanctioned casino
Casino
In modern English, a casino is a facility which houses and accommodates certain types of gambling activities. Casinos are most commonly built near or combined with hotels, restaurants, retail shopping, cruise ships or other tourist attractions...
s in most Chinese communities. It is played openly in major casinos in China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
(including Macau
Macau
Macau , also spelled Macao , is, along with Hong Kong, one of the two special administrative regions of the People's Republic of China...
); the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
(including Las Vegas, Nevada
Las Vegas metropolitan area
The Las Vegas Valley is the heart of the Las Vegas-Paradise, NV MSA also known as the Las Vegas–Paradise–Henderson MSA which includes all of Clark County, Nevada, and is a metropolitan area in the southern part of the U.S. state of Nevada. The Valley is defined by the Las Vegas Valley landform, a ...
; Connecticut
Connecticut
Connecticut is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and the state of New York to the west and the south .Connecticut is named for the Connecticut River, the major U.S. river that approximately...
; Atlantic City, New Jersey
Atlantic City, New Jersey
Atlantic City is a city in Atlantic County, New Jersey, United States, and a nationally renowned resort city for gambling, shopping and fine dining. The city also served as the inspiration for the American version of the board game Monopoly. Atlantic City is located on Absecon Island on the coast...
; and cardroom
Cardroom
A cardroom or card room is a gaming establishment that exclusively offers card games for play by the public. The term poker room is generally synonymous, since the gambling games played in such establishments are typically, and sometimes exclusively, variations of poker such as Texas hold 'em.Such...
s in California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
); Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
(including Edmonton, Alberta and Calgary, Alberta); Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
; and, New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...
. It dates back to at least the Song Dynasty
Song Dynasty
The Song Dynasty was a ruling dynasty in China between 960 and 1279; it succeeded the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period, and was followed by the Yuan Dynasty. It was the first government in world history to issue banknotes or paper money, and the first Chinese government to establish a...
, and is a game steeped in tradition.
The name "pai gow" is sometimes used to refer to a card game
Card game
A card game is any game using playing cards as the primary device with which the game is played, be they traditional or game-specific. Countless card games exist, including families of related games...
called pai gow poker
Pai gow poker
Pai Gow poker is an Americanized version of Pai Gow . The games of Pai Gow poker and Super Pan-9 were created by Sam Torosian and Fred Wolf.The game is played with a standard 52-card deck, plus a single joker...
(or “double-hand poker”), which is loosely based on pai gow. Pai gow loosely translates to "make nine" and was the basis for games like Chemin de Fer
Chemin de Fer
Chemin de fer is the French term for railway. It may refer to:*Musée Français du Chemin de Fer, the French National Railway Museum* Baccarat Chemin de Fer, a variation of the card game, Baccarat.* one of several railway companies in Europe...
and baccarat
Baccarat
Baccarat is a card game, played at casinos and by gamblers. It is believed to have been introduced into France from Italy during the reign of King Charles VIII , and it is similar to Faro and Basset...
.
Starting the Game
Tiles are randomized on the table, and are stacked into eight stacks of four tiles each in an assembly known as the woodpile. Various ritualistic "shuffles" are made, rearranging the tiles in the woodpile in standard ways that result in a new woodpile. Bets are then made.Next, each player (including the dealer) is given four tiles with which 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 respective hands, the player loses the bet. If one hand wins and the other loses, the player is said to push, and gets back only the money he or she bet. Generally seven players will play, and each player's hands are compared only against the dealer's hands.
Basic scoring
The name "pai gow" is loosely translated as "make nine" or "card nine". This reflects the fact that, with a few high-scoring exceptions, the best a hand can score is nine. To find the value of a hand, simply add the total number of pips on the two tiles, and drop the tens placeModular arithmetic
In mathematics, modular arithmetic is a system of arithmetic for integers, where numbers "wrap around" after they reach a certain value—the modulus....
.
So for instance, a 1-3 tile (a tile with one pip on one end and three pips on the other, for a total of four pips) used with a 2-3 tile (with five total pips) will score nine, since four plus five is nine. A 2-3 tile with a 5-6 tile will score six, and not sixteen, because you drop the 1. And a 5-5 tile with a 4-6 tile will score zero, since ten plus ten is twenty, and twenty reduces to zero when you drop the tens place.
Gongs and Wongs
There are special ways in which a hand can score more than nine points. The double-one tiles and double-six tiles are known as the Day and Teen tiles, respectively. If a Day or Teen tile is used with an eight, the pair is worth ten instead of the usual zero. (This is called a Gong.) If a Day or Teen tile is used with a nine, the hand is worth eleven instead of one. (This is called a Wong.) But a Day or Teen tile used with a ten is only worth two, not twelve; this is because only eights and nines can be combined with Days or Teens for higher values. (In other words, when Day or Teen tiles are combined with tiles other than an eight or nine, follow the normal scoring rules.)The Gee Joon tiles
The 1-2 and the 2-4 tiles are called Gee Joon tiles (or sometimes called wildcards). Either tile can count as 3 or 6, whichever scores more. So a 1-2 tile can be used with a 5-6 tile to make a hand worth seven points, rather than four.Pairs
The 32 tiles in a Chinese dominoes set can be arranged into 16 pairs, as shown in the picture at the top of this article. Eleven of these pairs have identical tiles, and five of these pairs are made up of two tiles that score the same, but look different. (The latter group includes the Gee Joon tiles, which can score the same, whether as three or six.) If a hand is made up of a pair, it always scores higher than a non-pair, no matter what the value of the pips are. (Pairs are often thought of as being worth 12 points each.)When two pairs are compared, the higher-valued pair wins. This is not determined by the sum of their pips, but by aesthetics. It must be memorized which pairs score more than other pairs. The highest pairs are the Gee Joon tiles, the Teens, the Days, and the red eights. The lowest scoring pairs are the mismatched nines, eights, sevens, and fives. But even the lowest-scoring pair will beat any non-pair.
Ties
When one of a player's hands is compared to one of the dealer's hands, it sometimes happens that both will have the same score. For instance, a player may have a front hand worth one point, consisting of a 3-4 tile and a 2-2 tile, and the dealer may have a front hand also worth one point, made up of a 5-6 tile and a 5-5 tile. In these cases, determine which tile in each hand has a higher value, as determined by the pair rankings mentioned above. In this case, the 2-2 tile is in a higher-ranking pair than the 3-4 tile, and the 5-5 tile is in a higher-ranking pair than the 5-6 tile. (Again, the rankings of the pairs follows no obvious pattern and must be memorized.) Since the 5-5 pair outranks the 2-2 pair, the dealer would win this front hand. In the unusual case of a true tie, where the dealer's high tile would be in the same pair as the player's high tile, the dealer wins the tie.There are two exceptions to the method described above. First, although the Gee Joon tiles form the highest-ranking pair, they are considered to have no value when evaluating ties. Second, any zero-zero tie is won by the Banker, regardless of the tiles in the hand.
Strategy
The key element of pai gow strategy is to present the optimal front hand and rear hand given four tiles dealt to the player. There are three ways to arrange four tiles into two hands, though practically some combinations may be the same.For instance, consider the four tiles at right. If tile A were made into a hand with tile B both resulting hands would score zero. However if tile A were paired with tile C, both hands would score 5. Or if tile A were paired with tile D, the front hand would score 3 and the rear hand would score 7. The player must decide which front hand-back hand combination is most likely to beat both of the dealers' hands, or at least to break a tie in the player's favor. In some cases a player with weaker tiles may deliberately attempt to attain a push so as to avoid losing the bet outright. Many players rely on superstition to choose tile pairings.
