Double Hand Poker: is it Beatable?

[J.A.Sucker]

I have been playing in California casinos for a few years now, and have always ignored the Asian games section. However, I strolled over there the other day and watched the action, just to see what all those people do with all those 100 dollar chips. Specifically, I was watching "Double Hand Poker", which seems to be the same as Pai Gow Poker. In the casinos up here, the house takes a vig of $1 for every 100 wagered. Then, you get dealt 7 cards to make a 2 card and a 5 card hand. You are either the player or the banker. Bankers win all tie hands (i.e. if you both have AK up front, the banker wins that outcome). From wizardofodds.com, I see that the outcomes of this game is like this:

Player wins both hands: 28.55% of the time
Tie: 41.47%
Banker wins both: 29.98%.

So, is this game beatable with the 1% vig?

Assume that I bank 100 hands at $100.
I would win 29.98*100 = 2998
I would lose 28.55*100= 2855
This is a net of +143, minus the 100 I pay in comission, I'm still up $43. So for every 10K I bank, I make $43... hardly anything to write home about, but are there people out there who make a living playing this game on this return? As far as I can tell, it takes no skill, just a big bankroll. You'd also have to wait till you got to be banker, but you could do this by betting the table minimum, I suppose. Further, how big of a roll would one need to play this game? The nice thing is that you wouldn't get heat, and the game doesn't get any tougher as the stakes go up into the stratosphere... though maybe people cheat in this game.

Anyone else thought about this game?

[Wildbill]

There is a logistical problem here. In every CA cardroom there are rules requiring you to play hands as a player to get the right to be the dealer. While this disadvantage can be overcome, it heavily eats into your overall edge. Another problem is every cardroom has corporations, groups of people that put together a huge bankroll and pay people to play their money 24/7. That proves there is profit to be made, but it also shows that you won't be alone doing it and its far from easy and steady money. The corporations take their profits down a couple times a year at most, and from what I hear the returns aren't anything special after paying out salaries. You are right to note there is edge, but its not significant because you have to play a few hands as a player each round and don't get to bank as much as you would like.

[J.A.Sucker]

Thanks for the reply, W.B. I did some further snooping around the other night just for the hell of it, and found out that these corporations (at least in my neck of the woods) also will fade any action as players if somebody wants to bank big, but they charge a vig on their action. I also was struck with how damned slow the game was - you'd only get like 15 hands an hour or something, and a third are pushes... eck. But, I guess that you could make some money playing a huge spread, or maybe just coming in and wanting to bank one hand a night for lots of cash if the other players would let you do this.

Really, my thoughts on this were pretty much a thought exercise, as it's good to keep that last brain cell working at times /forums/images/icons/confused.gif

[Wildbill]

Its slow because there seem to be 15 players around every table talking about their hands. Further its slow because they take the collections before and that seems to be time consuming too. The spread you can get in some games is quite huge, so big that I have been told it often can be only 3 or 4 players and then the local corporation as well as 2 or 3 other people or groups of people just trying to bank to win. The limits in these games are unreal, often being minimum bets of $500 or $1000 and max bets sometimes limited by just what the bankers are willing to back. Its not uncommon to have players betting $10,000 or more a hand in these games and the charge to bank is only $10 or $15 a hand. With close to a 2% edge, you can see its quite lucrative since if you are facing $5,000 in action, your EV is about $100 so the banking fee isn't that much. One guy I knew that was part of a group that would bank these said their group's bankroll was at times over half a million dollars, depending on what players were playing on a weekly basis as obviously at these stakes big players can come and go and the presence of just one at one of the high-limit nights makes a huge difference.