Open Face Chinese Poker Pineapple Strategy
Open Face Chinese Poker (OFC) A variation of Chinese Poker called Open Face Chinese Poker (OFC) has been spreading wildly across the world. In OFC the basic gameplay is as follows: Each player is dealt five cards initially. These cards are set in either the front, middle or back hands in any way the player sees fit. Pineapple OFC is a derivative of standard open-face Chinese poker with Fantasyland, the rules for which can be found here. Just as in regular OFC, the players get several cards in turn, and place.
- Open Face Chinese Poker Heads Up Strategy - how to play Open Face Chinese Poker, Open Face Chinese Poker Odds, Open Face Poker Charts, Strategy for Open Face Chinese Poker. Strategy articles on Pineapple OFC - the most popular OFC variation. Tips and tricks on flush draws, discard strategy, opponent foul%, fantasyland, lowball, and more.
- Four Mistakes You Are Making In Pineapple Open Face Chinese Why You Should Gamble For FantasyLand More Often: by Derric Haynie. Poker strategy articles, poker magazines, poker tools and poker.
This month I’ve been teaching myself how to play Crazy Pineapple Open Face Chinese Poker with Fantasyland. It is an awesome game, but needs a new name. For now, we’ll call it “OFC.”
Using Corvid’s OFC Poker app on my iPad ($5.99), anyone with an iPad or iPhone (I suspect this is also available for other smart device formats – Samsung, Droid, whatever…) can play OFC with friends, in much the same manner of Words With Friends and similar games. The app does not accept deposits or settle up monetary bets.
OFC is designed for 2 players, although it can be played with 3 players. Leave out the Crazy Pineapple part, and 4 players can play. But never more than that. The OFC app is set up for 2 players only (if there is a setting to add a 3rd player, I haven’t discovered it yet). In this game, players take turns, so when it is your turn, the app simply waits for you to act. When you do, your opponent gets a prompt that the action is now on him or her.
How to play, you might ask?
OFC is built on traditional Chinese Poker. In traditional Chinese poker, each player is dealt 13 cards. You then organize the cards into 3 poker hands: Two 5-card hands, and one 3-card hand. The 3-card hand is placed on the table above (or in front of) one of the 5-card hands, which is placed above the other 5-card hand. There is a requirement for the bottom hand to be the strongest, followed by the middle hand, with the top hand being the weakest. No straights or flushes can count for the top hand since it only has 3 cards. So an arrangement might look like this:
Top 8d 8c 3s One pair of eights
Middle Ts 9d Tc 9s Kd Two pair, tens and nines
Bottom Ah Kh Jh 4h 2h Flush, ace high
Pineapple Open Face Chinese Poker online, free
Next, you compare your top hand to your opponents top hand, middle v. middle and bottom v. bottom. Whoever has the strongest hand on each row wins one “point” for that row.
If real money is involved (this is poker, after all), each point has an agreed upon monetary value. While at the WSOP this summer, I saw OFC being played in the cash games area for $10 per point and higher.
Next, you determine whether any bonus (or “royalty”) points have been won. If you win all three rows, in addition to 3 points, you also get a bonus of 3 more points for scooping. There are also bonuses based on hand strength. The minimum requirement is a straight on the bottom (worth 2 bonus points), or three of a kind in the middle (worth 2 points), or a pair of sixes on the top (worth 1 point). In my sample hand above, the flush on the bottom is worth 4 bonus points, and the pair of eights on the top is worth 3 bonus points.
Notice that I could have arranged these cards differently, with two pair of nines and eights in the middle and one pair of tens at the top. The pair of tens would be worth 5 bonus points, so that would be a more profitable play.
If the top hand is stronger than the middle, or the middle is stronger than the bottom, your entire hand is “foul” (a/k/a “misset” or simply disqualified) and you are not eligible to win ANY points on the hand regardless of the strength of any individual row.
Got it? That’s just traditional Chinese Poker. Now for the Open Face part.
In OFC, each player is dealt 5 cards and takes turns setting these initial cards in the 3 rows. It might look like this:
Top 2c Useless card
Middle 7d 7h Setting a pair
Bottom Qs Js 9s Setting up for a flush or straight
Once a card is placed at the top/middle/bottom, it cannot be later moved to another row. OFC is a button game, so the player with the dealer button acts last, and has the benefit of seeing the opponent’s first 5 cards before acting. In the example above, if I had the button and my opponent showed 4 spades in his arrangement, I might try a different strategy instead of going for a flush on the bottom.
Then each player is dealt one card at a time, in sequence (button still last to act), and places each card in one of the rows to try to score the most points. After the first 5 cards are set, back and forth you go for 8 more cards, one at a time, until all 13 have been set. There are 3 simultaneous equations to solve here: 1) not fouling the hand, by making sure the bottom beats the middle, which beats the top; 2) having enough strength in each row to beat the opponent’s corresponding row; and 3) winning bonus/royalty points. Here is a good article with full details of bonus/royalty scoring.
Got it? But wait, there’s more. Whenever the top hand is QQ or higher (QQ earns 7 bonus points, and the hand is not fouled, you get to go to “Fantasyland.” This simply means that on the next hand, you get all 13 cards at once (like traditional Chinese Poker) and have complete information to use in arranging your 3 rows. Not only is there no risk of fouling your hand, but you never miss out on a huge hand like quads or a straight flush by splitting these up into different rows early in the hand. When you finish arranging the hand, you place all of the cards face down in their respective rows, so your opponent has no knowledge of which cards he might need to complete his rows are already dead. To your opponent, your hand looks like this:
Top x x x
Middle x x x x x
Bottom x x x x x
Obviously, going to Fantasyland is a huge benefit. But there is also a lot of risk of fouling the entire hand, if for example your first five cards include two Kings, and you decide to place them on the top row prior to having stronger hands in the middle and bottom. Gulp!
Got it? But wait, so far I’ve only covered OFC with Fantasyland. What about Crazy Pineapple?
In the Crazy Pineapple version, after the first 5 cards are set, each player is dealt 3 cards at a time. When it is your turn, you set 2 of 3 on the board, selecting the optimal row, and the 3rd card is discarded. Instead of 9 turns per player to complete a hand (initial 5 cards, then 8 turns with 1 card at a time), it only takes 5 turns per player (initial 5 cards, then 4 turns of setting 2 cards and discarding 1). This speeds up the game. Crazy Pineapple also gives you more total cards to choose from, resulting in more bonus points and trips to Fantasyland, making this the most popular version of the game for high rollers and gamblers. Since your opponent is looking at more total cards, when you do get to Fantasyland in the Crazy Pineapple version, you get dealt 14 cards instead of 13, and sometimes that last card is just what you need to score extra points.
Thus the final full name: “Crazy Pineapple Open Face Chinese Poker, with Fantasyland.”
About that name… it is hilarious when I mention this game to some of my poker-addicted friends. They screw their faces all up and say, oh my gosh, I could never learn a game as complicated as “Crazy Fantasy Island Open Face, Closed Mouth, Ancient Chinese Parcheesi Poker with a Twist” or whatever that was you just said. It’s just too complicated. This reaction comes before they even hear how the game is played.
Open Face Chinese Poker Scoring
Now that I’ve played a few dozen games, I can tell you dear readers, this game is not really so complicated. The mechanics are actually pretty straightforward: make 3 hands of progressive strength, then compare to your opponent’s 3 hands.
What is needed is a simpler name. When you first heard of Texas Hold’em or Omaha, surely that didn’t sound as difficult as building the entire Great Wall of China. I think I’m going to try “Open Face” as a short-hand name. Regular OFC players tend to fall back on the 3-letter acronym (“TLA”) OFC, but I’m not a big fan of TLAs in the first place. I mean, WTF, some people have trouble deciphering the acronyms, and the short-hand becomes a big WOT (waste of time) when you could have gotten TTP (to the point) by simply pronouncing the words rather than the letters. OMG. Let’s rein in the acronyms. LOL.
If you want to try some Open Face with me, for fun or money, download this app on your smart device. My ID is KKing David. I’m currently playing with 3 friends for $0.10 per point. The app sets up a game as 20 hands in the Crazy Pineapple version, or 10 hands of the regular OFC version, but this appears to be an arbitrary cutoff. In a live, casino OFC game, the loser of each hand would pass chips to the winner based on the net points for that hand. Since the app doesn’t facilitate the exchange of money, settling up after each batch of 20 hands makes sense. So far the largest scores have been about 100 points over a game of 20 hands, which at $0.10 per point is ten bucks.
Hopefully more posts to follow exploring some of the strategic and tactical issues, which I am still very much in the infancy of learning.
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This site is dedicated to helping you improve your Open-face Chinese Poker strategy. We are designing and introducing tools that can help you identify your leaks, and fix them. We also want to make users aware of possible cheating and 'bot' using that may be going on in the OFC community. We are dedicated to spreading information, but are strongly against using our tools, or any computer assistance, during actual gameplay.
During the pre-launch phase we have created a simple database for subscribers to input any current hand questions they have, and await the result, or scroll through and learn from.
We are selling access to our database through our Hand Input and Tactics Trainer web apps. We designed these tools to train you in playing perfect Pineapple Open-Face Chinese. We are the first site to openly offer 100% exhaustive solutions (meaning each answer was simulated to the very end, as opposed to sampling which can be highly inaccurate but get a result much faster). While we continue to build out the site and web apps, we are offering huge discounts on the upcoming subscriptions.
OFC EV Simulators and other strategy information, programs, and tools are already out there. Everyone is constantly improving their strategy and it's important that you keep up. Some people have even created their own Simulators for personal use, and may have even been using them as 'bots' to beat people out of real money. Even if they were used in a more professional manner, the players are undoubtedly strengthening their games each time they use these powerful tools. If you don't work on your game, you will start to fall behind, and find yourself playing against players that are consistently beating you, and that isn't what you want.
Play Warren uses a neural net approach to reach estimated solutions to each hand question. We use an exhaustive simulation approach and simplification techniques, which means when we research 'this' hand, our simulator has no knowledge about any other hand we have simulated in the past.
Play Warren is not enumerating 100% of each situation, which can quickly lead to accuracy issues, and have you doubting the solution. There is nothing worse than running the same simulation twice and getting two different answers.
Our simulator will never do that. We always enumerate 100% of the hand, using logical shortcuts, which guarantees an extremely high degree of accuracy. So while they may be able to get a 5th street evaluation in a few seconds, we get the actual answer in a few hours. We believe having the right answer is more important than having a fast answer, especially in very close situations.
If you have signed up for a subscription, your subscription will not start until the official launch of the site, at which point you will be notified via email. Launch is expected to be around October or November of 2014. Until then you will be able to submit hand questions and get responses via e-mail to: openfacesolutions@gmail.com. Sign up now for huge discounts, before prices go up for our launch.
We are currently focused on building tools for Pineapple Open-Face Chinese. We find the game to be more fun and engaging, and think its a better game than Traditional Open-Face Chinese. But we do plan to build out the Traditional OFC functionality soon as well.
Early game solutions are just around the corner and will be available by the time we launch.
Right now we cannot do starting hands do to the added level of complexity. We are working on the solution and it will be available as soon as possible.
Due to the demand, we will eventually offer 3-Player Pineapple. If more users are interested in 3 and 4 player Traditional OFC, we can build out the technology, but currently have no plans to do so.
Our current launch date is estimated to be around the end of 2014. As we get closer and closer, more and more services will become available as we complete them.
That site was a great start for our product lines and taught us a lot about the limitations and capabilities of OFC simulators. After reviewing the market and the power of our current simulator, we decided to pivot our business plan, and Open Face Solutions is the result. We wanted to create a global community where people shared their love and knowledge of the game, and we thought we needed a better name to fit that model.
Derric Haynie has been a professional poker player for 10 years and has a strong reputation in the poker community. He has written a book on poker, called 'Quantum Poker,' and continues to participate in the community as an educator, columnist for Card Player Magazine, and a coach in the online forums and training sites. Helmuth has been a software developer for the poker community for many years, and has helped conquer many of poker's greatest questions using software he designed. Maintaining a strong reputation in the community is the most important part of providing our services, and we look forward to working with you and providing excellent customer service.
Some Simulator specs:
- Runs on Dedicated 8-Core 'Process Optimized' Server
- Average of 240 Million simulations / second
- Always does a complete analysis - 100% exhaustive.
- FantasyLand Valued at 7.5 Points
Our Simulator works by finding the Game Theoretically Optimal - GTO - play at every decision point from 'this' point in the hand onward. It never makes a guess or approximation of the answer using a sampling method, but instead takes an exhaustive - or fully enumerative - approach to ensure precision. In order to achieve maximum speed with the simulator we added a few shortcuts:
Suit Removal - this means it doesn't care whether you have a 4-flush in hearts or spades, it simplifies all situations to the fewest suits possible. This is especially helpful in late game situations where there might not be any flushes possible.
Foul Checking - it checks to see if a play gives a 100% foul, and if it does, it doesn't enumerate that play (as its the worst possible play you can make), unless all plays give a 100% foul, in which case it chooses the last play and enumerates once filling in the value for the rest of the plays and saving up to 26x the work.
Hidden Card Irrelevance - when using an exhaustive approach, it turns out the value of being able to hide an important card from your opponent (on the sum of all future plays) doesn't affect what play you should make. This does technically skew the value of all plays, but is still not a problem because all answers are skewed by the same measure, so the best play never changes.
Our simulator limitations:
Value of hidden information on 'this' street - even though the enumerative value of hidden information on all of the future streets does not change the underlying values of the answers, their is a little bit of value in hiding information on 'this' current street. Right now we value these two plays the same:
a card that is of equal value to us, but exposes a valuable card to our opponent
and a card that is of equal value to us, and gives no additional value to our opponent.
So, for example, if our opponent needs an Ace in the middle to make a pair of aces, hiding an ace might help us a little by getting them to make a different decision down the road. Assuming the ace changes absolutely nothing for the value of our hand, we value discarding it the same as discarding any other card that doesn't change the value of our hand, even though it is clearly better to discard the Ace. The simulator does not account for this, because according to its enumeration, the ace is already a dead card, or permanently out of the deck, regardless of whether we play it or not. In order to properly account for this we would have to create either a highly complex and slow algorithm, or a neural net, both of which take away from the current power of our simulator. And since discarding the ace is only about 0.1 points better than the alternative option, it's really not a big deal. Anyone paying attention to the hand in question should be able to logically deduce that secret bonus value of hiding the information.
Early-Street Calculations - because we literally run every possible answer all the way to the end, early street calculations (which can require literally a billion trillion simulations) can take a long time under the current simulation method (like 7 days+). While we are working on a new method, specifically machine learning, or advanced branch trimming, we will be limited in our access to early street solutions. We know they are among the most important solutions out there and look forward to providing them as soon as we can.
For any other questions about the simulator, please contact us at openfacesolutions@gmail.com. We love to talk about it and are very open about our process.