CASINO POKER
Before you get too excited, let’s take a walk over to the other gaming and see what’s going on.
Forgetting to look for the sign identifying the blackjack pits, we notice some other gaming tables that are not immediately recognizable. Let’s take a closer look at these games, new to the casinos in the last decade of the twentieth century, and see what’s going on here.
At the first table, a dealer is dealing seven cards to each player; the players each pick them up and arrange them into two poker hands: a normal poker hand of five cards and a hand of two cards. This is Pal Gow Poker, which differs from normal poker in that the players play against the dealer, not among themselves. With one exception we’ll discuss in a later chapter, the hands have the same value as normal poker. We’ll get to a full description of these hands later, but for now the main difference between Pat Gow Poker and normal poker is how you set your hand. You arrange your seven cards into a five-card hand and a two-card hand. T0 will, both your five-card hand and your two-card hand must beat the dealer’s five card hand and two-card hand.
As long as we find ourselves in the poker area of the main casino floor, let’s take a look at some other new poker games. After talking to a friendly casino floor person (who watches the games to ensure that payoffs are made correctly and no cheating occurs), we learn there are three other variations of poker called Caribbean Stud, Let It Ride, and Three Card Poker. All of these games are played on blackjack-like tables, all played against the house. Specific rules vary among the games, but we learn that the main feature of each game is player bonuses for various types of poker hands. For example, a winning hand of three-of-a-kind pays 3 to 1 at Caribbean Stud and Let It Ride, and 4 to 1 at Three Card Poker.
Filed under: Casino Poker