Techniques are disclosed for dividing a TCP handshake into multiple parts, in a system comprising an edge device, an intermediary computing node, and a destination computing node. A client sends a TCP SYN packet to the edge device, to establish a TCP connection with the destination computing node. The edge device performs the handshake, and then forwards an ACK packet to the intermediary computing node. The intermediary computing node uses that ACK packet to generate a second SYN packet, and uses that SYN packet to perform a TCP handshake with the destination computing node. Then, TCP sequence numbers are converted between what is expected by the client and destination in packets sent between the two.