Millionaire Face-Up Pai Gow

Game Mechanics & Rules

Seven cards are dealt to the player and seven to the dealer. Both hands must be split into a five-card high hand (ranked by standard poker hand rankings) and a two-card low hand (pairs beat non-pairs; higher cards beat lower). The player must win both hands to receive a 1:1 payout, with no commission deducted. Winning only one hand is a push; losing both hands loses the stake. If the dealer's seven cards cannot make even a pair, straight or flush - an ace-high pai gow - the hand is an automatic push in the player's favour. Millionaire Mode is a paid $1 Royal Spades side bet that runs alongside the round; it does not reduce your main Face-Up Pai Gow payouts.

1. Place your main bet.
2. Seven cards are dealt face-up to both the player and the dealer. All cards are visible.
3. Set your hand: arrange five cards into the high hand and two cards into the low hand. The high hand must outrank the low hand by standard poker rules. Invalid hands (fouled hands) are adjusted to the highest valid configuration automatically.
4. The dealer's hand is also set according to house rules (the "house way"). Because the dealer's cards are face-up, the exact house way setting is visible to the player before finalising their own hand.
5. Compare hands: player high hand vs dealer high hand; player low hand vs dealer low hand. Win both to collect a full 1:1, commission free. Win one, push one, your bet is returned. Lose both, your stake is forfeited.
6. If the Millionaire Bet is active, count the target spades in the first six of your seven cards.

Optimal Strategy & Analysis

The optimal hand-setting strategy for the player exploits the full-information advantage of seeing the dealer's face-up cards. Rather than following a fixed house-way setting rule, the player can adopt a counter-strategy: set the two-card low hand to beat the dealer's two-card hand whenever possible while maintaining the minimum qualifying five-card high hand. This strategy is uniquely enabled by the face-up variant and is not possible in standard Pai Gow where the dealer's hand is partially hidden.

The standard Pai Gow house way for the five-card hand follows specific split rules for pairs, two pairs, three-of-a-kind, straights, flushes, full houses, four-of-a-kind, and straight flushes. In face-up Pai Gow, the player can observe the dealer's exact five-card and two-card setting before finalising their own split. When the dealer's two-card hand is weak (e.g., a low unpaired kicker), the player should prioritise winning the two-card hand even at some cost to the five-card hand, as a push on the five-card with a win on the two-card results in a push - better than an outright loss.

Because Face-Up Pai Gow takes no commission, a winning hand pays the full even money and there is no commission to play around - unlike standard Pai Gow, where a 5% cut on every win rewards push-heavy play. Here the only question is winning both hands, so set every hand to maximise your chance of beating the dealer on both.

Millionaire Mode is a paid $1 Royal Spades side bet that runs alongside the round; it does not reduce your main Face-Up Pai Gow payouts. The probability of specific spade combinations follows hypergeometric distribution sampling from the 53-card deck (52 cards plus the joker). The Joker that acts wild in the main game does not count toward the spade target.

Provably Fair Verification

Each Millionaire Face-Up Pai Gow hand shuffles a 53-card deck (the standard 52 plus the joker) using the Fisher-Yates algorithm seeded by the SHA-256 hash of the server seed, client seed, and round nonce concatenation. The shuffled cards are dealt alternately, the player taking the even positions (0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12) and the dealer the odd positions (1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13). All fourteen cards are generated from the same shuffle sequence, making the complete dealing derivation fully reproducible from the committed seed pair and nonce.

The server seed is committed as its SHA-256 hash before the session and visible in the fairness panel. On client seed rotation, the full server seed is revealed. Players reconstruct any hand by applying the Fisher-Yates shuffle to the revealed seeds and nonce and taking the even positions of the shuffled 53-card sequence (0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12) as the player's seven cards and the odd positions (1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13) as the dealer's. Spade identification follows from the standard suit encoding in the derivation formula.

Millionaire Mode is a paid $1 Royal Spades side bet that runs alongside the round; it does not reduce your main Face-Up Pai Gow payouts. The card deal and the spades count are settled from one SHA-256 chain and audited as a single artefact post-session.

Millionaire Mode Technical Details

Millionaire Mode is a paid $1 Royal Spades side bet added to every round. Main-table payouts are NOT reduced. Main bets must total at least $1 USD for the side bet to attach.

Each round, the cards dealt for the side bet are checked. The Royal Spades are the six top spades - 9, 10, Jack, Queen, King and Ace of spades. Every distinct Royal Spade among the dealt cards counts as one hit; a repeated rank does not count twice and the Joker never counts.

Paytable per $1 side bet: 6 hits = $1,000,000; 5 hits = $5,000; 4 hits = $400; 3 hits = $20; 2 hits = $2; 0 or 1 hits pay nothing.

The $1,000,000 prize is pre-funded and paid in a single transaction on six hits. Lower tiers pay alongside the round settlement. The Royal Spades result is independent of the main-game outcome.