Home/Face Up Pai Gow Poker/Guide
This page covers only what's different from standard Pai Gow Poker. The two hands, fouling, hand rankings, the joker, and the house way the banker's cards get set by are all identical — see the Pai Gow Poker guide for the full house way reference. What changes here is the deal order and the payout.
What's different
Dropping the 5% commission would tilt the game in the players' favor on its own, so Face Up Pai Gow Poker adds a single rule to balance it back out: whenever the banker's best 5-card hand is Ace-high with no pair — one of the weaker hands you can hold — every player's bet at the table is an automatic push, win or lose, regardless of what they're holding. It's the one hand shape in standard Pai Gow Poker that would otherwise usually lose for the banker; turning it into a universal push is what pays for commission-free action on every other hand shape. Everything else about settlement is unchanged: win both your hands to win the bet, win one and push the other for your bet back, and an exact tie ("copy") on either hand still goes to the banker.
Published odds analyses put the house edge here at roughly 1.8%, noticeably better for the player than standard commissioned Pai Gow Poker's roughly 2.7% — the no-commission math wins out over the Ace-high push often enough to matter, even though a push happens close to half the time either way (Pai Gow Poker's defining feature, face-up or not).
Worked examples
The banker's hand below is set with the same published house way covered in the full guide — it's set before you'd ever see your own cards in a real game, so by the time you're arranging your hand, you already know exactly what you're trying to beat.
Two pair, Kings and Jacks — both high tier, so it splits: Kings anchor the high hand, Jacks become the low hand.
No pair anywhere in the seven cards, and no straight or flush achievable either — house way's "no pair" rule: the single highest card (Ace) plus the four lowest form the high hand; the 2nd- and 3rd-highest (K, Q) form the low hand.
Aces and Kings — a pair of Aces involved always splits, whatever the other pair's tier: Aces anchor the high hand, Kings become the low hand.
One pair (Queens): the pair stays in the high hand, and the two highest remaining cards (8, 6) become the low hand.
Hand rankings
Standard poker hand ranking applies to the 5-card hand, with Pai Gow Poker's one well-known variation carried over unchanged:
Everything else is ordinary 5-card poker: pair, two pair, three of a kind, straight, flush, full house, four of a kind, straight flush, in that order. The 2-card hand can only ever be a pair, or two unconnected high cards — no two-card flushes or straights.
The 53rd card
One joker rides along with the standard 52 cards, exactly as in standard Pai Gow Poker. In the 5-card hand, it's semi-wild: it always counts as an Ace, so it can make a pair, three of a kind, four of a kind, or even Five Aces with real Aces. The only other thing it can be is the missing card in a straight, flush, or straight flush. A pair of 7s plus the joker stays a pair of 7s with an Ace kicker. In the 2-card hand, it only ever plays as an Ace — an Ace-and-joker 2-card hand is the single best possible low hand on the table, ranking above even a real pair of Aces.
How the banker's hand gets set
The banker's seven cards above were split using the exact same published house way as standard Pai Gow Poker — the full tabbed reference, covering every hand shape from no pair through five Aces, lives on the Pai Gow Poker guide page rather than being duplicated here, since it's identical. What's genuinely different here is that you get to see the banker's finished hand before you ever touch your own seven cards — information a standard Pai Gow Poker player never has going in.
Matching house way on your own hand is still an excellent, well-tested baseline — it's the same procedure a real dealer would use if you handed your cards over and said "play it for me." Setting your hand specifically to maximize beating the banker's known, exposed hand is a real, deeper strategic layer some sharp players use that can occasionally out-perform blind house way here — this guide doesn't model that exposed-information strategy yet, the same honesty standard as everything else on this site: house way first, verified and tested, before anything more advanced. The hand-setting trainer is what matching house way is graded against, and it shows the banker's finished hand before you set yours, same as a real table.