Both hands are set by a common house way, the banker always banks, copies go to the banker and wins pay even money less 5%. Play money only.
Your session
Press "Simulate the session" to play every hand and see how your money moves.
- Maths reviewed by Josh Miller
- Tested by Diana Westfield
This Pai Gow Poker simulator deals real seven-card hands from a 53-card deck with the joker, sets yours and the banker’s by the house way, and settles them with the 5% commission. Deal one hand to see how the split works, or simulate 10,000 hands to see what a long session actually looks like. Expect a lot of flat line: around four hands in ten are pushes.
What the Pai Gow Poker simulator shows
Run 1,000 hands at £10 and the maths points at a £272 loss. In our test sessions the middle result was about £230 down, nine in ten landed between roughly £610 down and £90 up, and only about one in six finished ahead. The chart rarely does anything dramatic, and that’s the honest appeal of the game: wins pay only 0.95 to 1, losses take a whole bet, and the 41% pushes cushion everything. The losses you do take come mostly from two places, the commission on every win and the copies, where equal hands go to the banker.
| Result | How often (house way both sides) |
|---|---|
| You win both hands (paid 0.95) | about 29% |
| One hand each (push) | about 41% |
| Banker wins, including copies | about 30% |
Our own long runs, about 245,000 hands, came out at 2.75% per hand, with a margin of about ±0.3%, which matches the 2.7% usually quoted for a player who uses the house way against a dealer who banks.
Why the house way is the strategy
Setting your hand the house way gets you within a whisker of perfect play. The few hands where a cleverer split helps are rare and the gain is tiny. So the simulator doesn’t let you set hands; it shows you how they’d be set and why. If you want to check a particular seven cards, use the Pai Gow Poker hand setter, and for the rules of thumb behind it see the CasinoCalcs Pai Gow Poker strategy chart.
Banking and side bets
The one real way to improve the game is to bank, where the casino lets players do it. As banker you win the copies, which turns the edge round on that part of the game, though you still pay commission and you cover the whole table. The Fortune bonus and other side bets go the other way, with edges several times the main game’s. Neither is in this simulator, which plays the plain bet only.
The simulator plays with exactly the strategy described here. You can deal one hand at a time to see the decisions, or run a whole session to see how far luck pulls the result away from the average.
A slow game is still a paid one. Set the session length before you start. BeGambleAware.org can help if it stops being fun.