Pai gow poker is an americanized version of the Chinese gambling game pai gow, with the difference that it's played with poker cards instead of Chinese dominoes. The game was created by Sam Torosian and Fred Wolf to attract players to his casino and beat the competition in the Los Angeles area. It immediately became very popular. Today it's an Internet gaming favorite.

The game is for six players plus the dealer. The goal of the game for each player is to defeat the bank by coming up with a 5-card and a 2-card poker hand. The online version follows the same rules, with the exception that the dealer is the casino. The rules are a mix of original Chinese pai gow rules and American poker. The game is played against the house, so a player's chance to win isn't affected by the number of players at the table. Compared to several other kinds of casino games it's rather slow, which is because there's lots of room for ties. The game is still very popular because it can be played with comparably small bankrolls.

The old Asian version of the game was an option casino owner Sam Torosian was looking at in the late 1970s to offer something new to his audience. He was losing ground to other houses in the area and needed something new. When Torosian and Wolf first looked at pai gow, it seemed to complex, too slow and foreign, so they decided to add things to make it more interesting. They combined it with poker rules and switched from Asian dominoes to a standard deck of poker cards.

When the game first appeared in casinos in the Los Angeles area, it didn't initially take off, and at first seemed less than attractive to casinos because of its slow pace and low house advantage. But it became popular nonetheless and was introduced to Las Vegas casinos in the early 1980s. The rest is history. Today, along with other developments in online gaming, it comes in different variants and with different designs. Check back with us every now and then to stay on top of things; a lot is going on, and we're always updating our listings when we find something new.