I asked about this at three different casinos. It would seem to be good business to allow any bet, because the casino will stand to get 5% of a larger amount. If he doesn’t, the dealer will give him the choice to buy more or forfeit his turn to bank.Īs for the first question, the table limit still applies when a player is banking. To answer the second question first, the banker must have enough chips on the table to cover all bets. Yet every single dealer to have dealt the game had to be bothered with learning the exception. In my estimation this hand may have come up about 100 times in the history of the game, but has probably never affected the outcome of a hand compared to the alternative of playing a full house in the high hand. The probability of getting this hand is 1 in 25,690,513.

Two other rules I find ridiculous are counting A2345 (known as 'the wheel') as the second highest straight and bothering to state an exception in the house way that if the dealer has five aces with a pair of kings to play the pair of kings in the low hand. Whoever invented the game probably came up with that strategy rather arbitrarily and it since become a hard habit to break.

The reason the casinos use a more complicated and less powerful rule is probably out of tradition. For example I would use it when banking against other players. However I think it is probably just any reasonable strategy. My two pair rule is optimized to play against the house way. Also, for PR purposes, that pit boss lost my business forever over a mess that netted the casino $20. It would strike me that once a hand is set and the first hand is settled, there can be no change.

We were all told to stay at the table until the situation was resolved, but after it was, despite not knowing each other, we all left not only the table, but the casino entirely. The pit boss actually went to the players’ stacks and took the monies from them after consulting the videotape to confirm the wager amounts. This resulted in two of the players going from a push to a loss. They then went to the discard tray to replay the hands. The dealer had missed the fact there was a straight with a higher 2-card hand, but set it and went through 4 players when the pit boss came over and said 'You set that wrong' and proceeded to re-set the hand. At a full pai gow poker table, the dealer set her cards, I believe it was a Jack/Ten in the 2-card hand and a flush in the 5 card-hand.

I ran into a situation in Reno a couple years ago that no one else seems to have heard before.

How to play fortune pai gow poker