Chinese poker: the thirteen-card game, explained

What Chinese poker is

Chinese poker is a card game for two to four players in which each player is dealt thirteen cards and splits them into three poker hands. There are no betting rounds, no folding and no bluffing in the usual sense. Everyone sets their hands face down, everyone turns them over at once, and the hands are compared row by row.

It uses a standard 52-card deck and the normal poker hand rankings. With four players the entire deck is dealt, which is why four-handed is the traditional game.

Setting your three hands

Your thirteen cards become three hands:

You can take as long as the table allows to set them: you see all thirteen cards before placing any. That is the whole difference from the open-face version, and it makes Chinese poker a puzzle of arrangement rather than a gamble on cards still to come.

Top

Q Q 4

Pair of queens

Middle

8 8 8 J 2

Three eights

Bottom

K T 7 5 3

King-high flush

The rule you cannot break

Back ≥ Middle ≥ Front. The back hand must be at least as strong as the middle, and the middle at least as strong as the front.

Set them out of order and the hand is fouled — a misset, or a dead hand depending on who you play with. A fouled hand loses all three rows to every opponent. It sounds impossible to get wrong when you can see every card, and it happens anyway: you keep a pair of kings for the front because it wins that row so often, build a flush in the back, and leave the middle with a pair of jacks. Kings beat jacks, so the front outranks the middle and the whole hand is dead.

Fouling works the same way in OFC, where it is far easier to do because the cards arrive blind. We wrote a whole page on fouled hands and how to avoid them.

How Chinese poker is scored

Every player settles separately against every other player: in a four-handed game you are playing three matches at once. Each matchup compares back with back, middle with middle and front with front. A row that ties scores nothing. Two scoring systems are common, so agree on one before the first deal.

The 1-6 method

One point for each row you win. Win all three — a scoop — and you collect three extra points, six in total. Winning two rows and losing one nets you a single point.

The 2-4 method

One point for each row, plus one point for winning the matchup overall (two rows out of three). Winning two rows is worth two points; a scoop is worth four. The extra point makes the overall result count for more than the row-by-row tally.

Open Face Chinese uses the 1-6 structure, with royalties added on top — the details are on our page about OFC scoring.

Naturals, royalties and surrender

These are house rules. Plenty of games use none of them, and the ones that do rarely agree on the amounts, so settle them before you play.

• Naturals. Some deals win automatically, before the hands are compared: three flushes, three straights, six pairs, and the dragon — thirteen different ranks from ace to king. A natural is paid a fixed bonus by every opponent.
• Royalties. Extra points for premium hands in a given row: trips in front, a full house in the middle, four of a kind or a straight flush in the back. OFC turned this into a fixed schedule — see the royalties chart.
• Surrender. Some tables let you give up a hopeless hand before the reveal for a fixed cost smaller than being scooped.

Chinese poker vs Open Face Chinese

The two meet in Fantasyland: when an OFC player earns it, their next hand is dealt all thirteen cards at once and set in private — a hand of classic Chinese poker inside the open-face game. If you already know how to set thirteen cards, you already know how to play your best OFC hands.

For everything else about the open-face game, start with Open Face Chinese poker explained and the full OFC rules.

How to set a hand well

1. Build the back first. Find the strongest five-card hand you can make, then see what it leaves. The back is where your best hand has to go anyway.
2. Then balance middle against front. The common decision is whether to put a pair in front or keep it in the middle to make that row stronger. A strong front wins its row surprisingly often, because most players leave rubbish there.
3. Play for two rows, not three. Under both scoring systems the matchup is decided by winning two rows. A set that is solid everywhere usually beats one built around a single monster hand.
4. Check the order before you turn over. Every time. It is the one mistake that costs you against everybody at the table at once.

If you want to play the open-face version against opponents who punish a bad shape, that is what we built: OFC Poker for iOS plays Pineapple and Classic OFC against bots, with Fantasyland included.