The complete rules of Open Face Chinese poker

What you need

• One standard 52-card deck. No jokers.
• Two or three players. (Three is common; four only works in Classic OFC.)
• An agreed stake per point — or nothing at all, if you're playing for pride.
• Table space for three rows of five cards per player. It needs more room than people expect.

The board: three rows

Each player builds three hands in front of them:

Thirteen cards fill a board. Every card is placed face-up and stays visible to everyone for the rest of the hand.

Dealing order

Classic OFC

1. Each player is dealt five cards and places all five.
2. Then one card at a time, placed immediately, for eight more rounds.
3. After the ninth round every board holds thirteen cards. Showdown.

Pineapple OFC

1. Each player is dealt five cards and places all five.
2. Then three cards at a time: place two, discard one face-down. Four times.
3. 5 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 = thirteen cards. Showdown.

In both cases the dealer button moves one seat left after every hand, and in a dealt game the player to the dealer's left acts first on each deal. Most home games just let everyone place at the same time, which is faster and only matters when players are using each other's placements as information — which good players are.

Placement rules

Three rules, and they are the whole game:

1. A placed card never moves. Not to another row, not at the end, not ever.
2. You must place every card you are required to place. You cannot pass, and you cannot leave a row short if you have cards in hand. If the only legal spot left is one that will foul your hand, you place it there anyway.
3. A row cannot be overfilled. Three cards up top, five in each of the others. Once a row is full it is closed.

In Pineapple, the discarded card goes face-down to a muck pile and is never revealed. Its absence is information in itself — an opponent who discarded on a turn where three hearts came out probably didn't have a heart to throw.

Hand rankings in each row

Middle and bottom use the standard poker hand rankings you already know: high card, pair, two pair, trips, straight, flush, full house, quads, straight flush.

The top row is three cards, which means only three hands exist up there: three of a kind, one pair, and high card. Three cards to a straight or a flush is worth nothing — a common beginner trap. The full hand-ranking reference, including three-card hands, has the exact order.

Rows are compared using normal poker comparison: a pair of aces beats a pair of kings, and if both rows have the same hand the kickers decide. Identical rows tie and neither player gets the point.

Fouling

Your board is legal only if bottom ≥ middle ≥ top. If the middle beats the bottom, or the top beats the middle, the hand is fouled.

A fouled hand:

• loses all three rows;
• concedes the scoop bonus to the opponent;
• collects no royalties at all, even ones it legitimately made;
• does not stop the opponent collecting their royalties.

Top

A A 4

Pair of aces

Middle

K K 8 6 2

Pair of kings

Bottom

Q Q J 9 3

Pair of queens

Fouling is not a penalty for playing badly, it is the risk you take every time you go for a big royalty. The maths of when it's worth it is its own page.

Scoring: rows, scoop, royalties

Against each opponent, separately:

• +1 point for each row you win. Ties score nothing for either player.
• +3 points extra if you win all three rows — the scoop.
• Royalties for strong hands, added on top and netted against theirs.

So a scoop with no royalties is worth 6 points to the winner and −6 to the loser: three rows plus the bonus. That 1-1-1-plus-3 structure is the most common convention and the one the app uses; some tables play a scoop bonus of 6 instead of 3, which makes the game far swingier.

Royalties, short version

The middle pays double the bottom for the same hand, because it is harder to make a strong hand in the middle without fouling. The full chart, with the per-rank values for the top row, is on the royalties page — and worked scoring examples are on the scoring page.

Fantasyland

If you finish a legal hand with a pair of queens or better in the top row, you enter Fantasyland on the next hand: you are dealt all thirteen cards at once, face-down, and arrange your whole board in private before the hand plays out.

It is an enormous advantage and it stacks — most tables let you stay in Fantasyland by making trips on top, quads or better on the bottom, or a full house in the middle while you're there. The entry and re-entry rules in detail.

House rules that vary

Agree these before the first hand, because every one of them changes strategy:

• Scoop bonus: 3 or 6. Three is standard. Six makes chasing scoops much more attractive.
• Fantasyland entry: QQ or KK. QQ is standard. Some tables raise it to kings to keep Fantasyland rare.
• Fantasyland cards: 13 or 14. Some rooms deal fourteen and discard one, which is a noticeably bigger edge.
• Royalty scale. The chart above is the common one, but the top-row trips values and the royal flush bonus vary. Write down whichever you use.
• Royalties on a fouled hand. Universally: none. If someone argues otherwise, they're inventing it.

That's the whole ruleset. If you'd rather be shown than told, the walkthrough deals a hand with you and explains each placement as it happens.