Pai Gow Moments

If you were to do a search on the Internet for Pai Gow, the chances are that what you would find would be online game rooms for Pai Gow Poker, a poker variation derived from Pai Gow tiles. Majority of the online gaming casinos today have offerings for Pai Gow Poker, there is no doubt about that. However, finding a game room online for Pai Gow tiles would be a little bit of a task.

One easy way to play Pai Gow online would be to go to Wizard of Odds. However, their Pai Gow game is really only good for practice games. You are a single player and you do not play against other players. You would not need to download any software, which is a plus I suppose. Still, I do not think that you will have much excitement playing like this forever.

Believe me, I have spent a lot of time trying to find a decent online game room offering Pai Gow tiles but so far, I have come up with nothing. As for Pai Gow Poker, you can have your pick from countless online casinos. You also have the alternative of playing Pai Gow tiles in land based casinos. That option is perhaps the best way for you to go at the moment. It seems that Pai Gow Poker has superseded the original Pai Gow tile game when it comes to the online community. Perhaps its similarity to other card games is the reason for this. Or maybe the tag “poker” could be the reason for its popularity. I know that does not really give much help regarding how to play Pai Gow tiles online, but that is all that is to be had at present.

However, the lack of online game rooms offering Pai Gow tiles does not mean that you cannot polish and hone your skills online, from the comforts of your home. There are quite a few sites offering tutorials for Pai Gow tiles. One of the most comprehensive and useful sites is Paigow.com. In this page, you can find a step by step comprehensive tutorial – from the rules to equipment to the basic mechanics. You can also practice your skills at Paigow.com. Once you have sharpened your Pai Gow tiles skill to its best, then you can head on out to a casino and see how it goes.

Most activities known to man are learned. That is, we do not know exactly how to do something at the first try. What happens is that we go through a learning process that varies depending on the person and the activity. This is where the concept of the learning curve comes in. The learning curve effect states that “the more times a task has been performed, the less time will be required on each subsequent iteration. It was discovered by the nineteenth-century German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus.”

You may be thinking, this is all well and good – it sounds really scientific and all – but how does it relate to Pai Gow? After all, I just want to have fun. Well, there is the issue of actually learning to play the game. Just as with other games (cards, tiles, or whatever), I am sure that if you know how to play Pai Gow, that was not always the case. If you do not know how to play it yet, well you still have to go through the process of learning the game.

So again, back to the question – where does the learning curve effect come into the picture? When you ask the question “How easy or hard is it to learn Pai Gow? it is essentially asking about the learning curve of Pai Gow. So how easy and how fast is it to learn Pai Gow?

There is not straightforward answer to this question. First of all, Pai Gow can be a little bit more complicated than the usual card game. Not everyone is familiar with the tiles and dominoes used in Pai Gow. So the first step in learning the game is to familiarize one’s self with the tiles and the different patterns first. Then one must learn the different combinations. Depending on how fast an individual can pick up these concepts, the process might take quite some time. That is why in learning Pai Gow, you would need to spend a considerable amount of time practicing the basic concepts first.

Once you have grasped the concepts of the tiles fully, then it will be easy street for you. Of course, understanding and memorizing the values and possible combinations is one thing. Actually using them correctly in a game would be another thing. As such, it would be safe to say that Pai Gow’s learning curve would be a little less steep than other card games. It takes patience and some time but it’s all worth it.