Register here: http://gg.gg/owufw
Ang Pineapple OFC ay isang hango ng standard na open-face Chinese poker sa Fantasyland, ang mga panuntunan ay matatagpuan dito. Tulad ng sa regular na OFC, ang manlalaro ay makakakuha ng ilang mga barahailang kapalit, at ilagay ang mga ito n nakahaya hanggang makagawa sila ng isang 13-card hand, na binubuo ng isang ’top’, ’middle,’ at ’bottom” hilera ng tatlo, lima, at limang. And no two hands are ever the same.This app supports Regular and Pineapple Open Face Chinese Poker (OFC), and now with Deuce (2-7) Middle Pineapple, with in-app purchase.We also include hand. Open Face Chinese is one of the newest games that is really starting to take off. It’s vastly different from other forms of poker, such as Texas Hold’em, and can be played with 2-4 players. Players set their hands and play for points - it’s important to declare how much points are worth prior to starting! Here, we introduce the game, and play a few OFC Pineapple rounds, against a computer opponent. A million games are played every week, by poker players around the world. Check us it out on iPhone.
*Abc Open Face Chinese Poker With Pineapples
*Open Face Chinese Poker Pineapple Rules
*Abc Open Face Chinese Poker With Pineapple Juice
*Abc Open Face Chinese Poker With Pineapple Cake
*Chinese Pineapple PokerNikolai Yakovenko
Poker pro Nikolai Yakovenko, co-creator of the ABC Open-Face Chinese Poker iPhone app, returns today to explain the rules of a new, popular variant of OFC, Open-Face Chinese Poker with 2-7 in the Middle.
Open-Face Chinese Poker with 2-7 in the Middle — a.k.a. “2-7 OFC” or “Deuce Pineapple” — is a turn-based card game that is played heads up, or sometimes three-handed. Players take turns, drawing cards and placing them into three separate poker hands. Each of these hands is played face up, meaning that players can see all of the cards that have been played, and these cards can’t be moved between each player’s three poker hands once they have been placed.
The “Deuce” designation means that the middle poker hand is played according to the rankings used in 2-7 lowball, while the other two hands are played as regular “high” poker hands.
The game might sound complicated, but it really isn’t. Deuce Pineapple is now available on the ABC Open-Face Chinese Poker app, for iPhone and iPad. You can practice against our computer AI, or challenge your friends to a turn-based match.
Later this week I’ll return with some discussion of strategy for 2-7 OFC, but today let’s focus on understanding the rules of the game.Three Hands: High, Low, High
The objective of 2-7 Open-Face Chinese is to place 13 cards into three hands: a five-card bottom hand, a five-card middle hand, and a three-card top hand.
As noted, the game plays just like high-only Pineapple OFC, except with the middle played as a 2-7 lowball hand. This means that your bottom hand is a regular five-card poker hand (with flushes, straight and full houses), the top hand is a three-card high hand (including pairs, trips, but no three-card straights or flushes), while the middle hand must contain five low cards with no pairs, no straights, and no flushes. The lower these cards the better.Taking Turns and Discarding
The game is called Open-Face Chinese Poker (or OFC for short) because you’re building these three hands face up a few cards at a time.
As with all Open-Face games, you start by getting dealt five cards and place them all. On subsequent turns (following the procedure used in Pineapple OFC), you get three cards face down and place two of them in any of the available rows (bottom, middle or top). The unused card then gets discarded face down. Discards are out of play, and not shuffled back into the deck, and your opponents are not allowed to see your discards. Therefore there are only enough cards in a deck to play Deuce Pineapple OFC either heads-up or three-handed. Fantasyland
If you make a qualifying hand with kings or better up top, or a wheel — — in the middle, then on the next hand you enter Fantasyland. Just like in high-only Pineapple OFC, in Fantasyland you get 14 cards right away and set 13 of them into three rows face down while discarding one. Your opponents then play out their hands normally, and the result is scored against your hand.
You can stay in Fantasyland, earning another round in this advantageous position, by making a big enough bonus. For Deuce Pineapple you need either trips (three of a kind) on top, a wheel low in the middle, or quads (four of a kind) or better on the bottom to remain in Fantasyland.15-Card Super Fantasyland
In a twist from high-only Pineapple OFC, you can also earn a 15-card “Super Fantasyland” round by qualifying for Fantasyland twice in the same normal hand. Here, for example, the player qualifies for Super Fantasyland by making both aces on top and a wheel in the middle.
This double-bonus is rare, but well worth it. If you stay in Fantasyland, “Super” or otherwise, you get a normal 14-card Fantasyland hand.Qualification and Scoring
To make a qualifying hand, your top hand must be no better (as a normal poker hand) than your bottom hand. And your middle low hand must be at least a ten-low, meaning that your biggest card is no higher than a ten without a pair, a straight, or a flush. As with other Chinese Poker variants, a disqualified or “fouled” hand automatically loses every row.
The three rows are scored against your opponent with the winner of each row getting +1 point. If you win all three rows, this also results in a +3 scoop bonus. In addition to winning, scooping, and possible Fantasyland qualification, you also get points for any bonuses earned by a qualifying hand, even if that hand loses the row.
Bonuses for the bottom hand start with a straight, the low middle hand with a nine-low, and the top row with a pair of sixes. Full bonuses are listed here:Sample Game
That’s a mouthful, but the game is actually quite simple. Even if you haven’t played a lot of 2-7 lowball before, that part of the game is very intuitive. Let’s fly through a quick round of 2-7 OFC, starting with the initial deal of five cards.
Once we’re dealt our first five cards, we place them. Here we’ll put the small ones into our middle low hand.
Next round, we get three cards.
We play two of them in the middle, locking up a seven-low. The is discarded, and is now out of play without the possibility of being returned to the deck.
On the next round, we play the up top, the on the bottom, and discard the .
Skipping ahead, on the last round we catch another ace. Since our bottom hand is three of a kind and thus a bigger hand than a pair of aces, we can play the ace up top for a nice bonus.
We win the top row with aces and the middle row with a seven-low, so we earn +13 in row bonuses. Our opponent wins the bottom row with a full house and earns +13 in bonuses. Thus after all of that, we win a single point.
However, making on top also takes us to Fantasyland. On the next round, we get 14 cards, and place any 13 of them into top, middle, and bottom.
It’s a pretty good hand, with bonuses for an eight-low in the middle, and a flush on the bottom.
We win three points overall, but our opponent makes a wheel in the middle, so on the next hand he will be in Fantasyland. And so it continues...
Later this week I’ll return to share some strategy considerations for Open-Face Chinese Poker with 2-7 in the Middle. Meanwhile, for more OFC strategy advice click here and follow me on Twittter at @ivan_bezdomny.
Get all the latest PokerNews updates on your social media outlets. Follow us on Twitter and find us on both Facebook and Google+!
*TagsNikolai YakovenkoOpen-Face Chinese Pokercash game strategyChinese Poker
*Related PlayersNikolai YakovenkoNikolai Yakovenko
If you’re reading this, I assume that you’ve already played open-face Chinese poker (OFC). Perhaps you’ve even read some of my previous articles on the subject, or have heard me talk about OFC with Kristy Arnett on the Strategy with Kristy Podcast. If you’re not familiar with the rules and basic strategy of standard OFC (with fantasy land), you can read about them here.
However, with all of that OFC rah-rah and experience, pineapple OFC may be something that you’ve just heard mention of, or perhaps seen your favorite poker tweeters bragging about on the Internet. Read on, as I rush through the basics, to how pineapple strategy differs from standard OFC to some of the odds for the numbers-driven crowd.
No one knows whether the pineapple OFC variant is here to stay, and it certainly won’t be the last of the OFC variants that will become popular. It will never become the main set of rules under which OFC is played. At best, pineapple OFC is to pot-limit Omaha what standard OFC is to no-limit hold’em.
But for my money, pineapple OFC is a great game. It’s like regular OFC on steroids, keeping the same game structure, but with great hands coming in twice as often, and in half the rounds. The game can’t be spread four-handed, but it makes for great heads-up and three-way action. It’s more addictive than regular OFC and not a good choice for a game with which to end a poker night, because you’ll no doubt be playing till the wee hours.
It’s also exhausting. With more possible plays on every turn, and with more cards to account for, it’s not a game that you can play on auto-pilot. Even heads up. But enough banter, let’s start with the rules.
One Extra Card, Four Faster Rounds
The first five cards are played the same way as in regular OFC, with players placing their cards in any of the three possible rows, and 13 available spaces. Abc Open Face Chinese Poker With Pineapples
After that, players get three cards in turn, and set two cards as they wish, while discarding the third card. Thus the game is reduced to four rounds of two cards played per round, after the initial five. This differs from standard OFC, in which there are eight rounds of one card placed at a time.
It is customary to place your discarded card face-down, thus adding an awkward hidden-information element that’s absent from regular OFC. On a side note, I think that this is a bad rule, but it’s the way that the game is usually played. The game would be better if players showed all three cards and discarded the unplaced card face-up. This would make it easier to analyze and second-guess how everyone is playing. Friends who are learning the game often ask me about a play, thus revealing their discard. I don’t think this affects the game very much, and it would be more fun if this were standard. Even so, most people play with the third card discarded face-down, and I don’t expect this to change.
Same Cutoffs, but Extra Cards for Fantasy Land
The rules for qualifying for fantasy land are the same as in standard OFC: you need or better on top. Once there, you need either quads on the bottom, a full house in the middle, or trips on top to stay in fantasy land. However, the astute reader will immediately see that fantasy land should be worth much less in a game where players get extra cards and generally make much bigger hands in the course of regular play.
Thus in pineapple OFC, a player in fantasy land gets 14 cards, discards one, and plays his or her best 13-card hand. This may not seem like a huge advantage over regular Fantasyland, but it’s actually quite substantial. Skip to the numbers at the end of this piece to see the details, but for now suffice it to say that 14-card fantasy land in pineapple ends up being worth almost exactly the same as 13-card fantasy land in standard OFC.
Maybe this is an accident, but I think it’s further proof that OFC poker hit some sort of golden ratio when it was invented by those crazy Russians a couple of years back. Somehow giving the fantasy land player one extra card is exactly what it takes to maintain the balance between fantasy land value and regular hand value that makes OFC so much fun.
’The Game Done Changed.’ / ’Game’s the Same, Just Got More Fierce.’
This exchange between Cutty and Slim Charles on Season 3 of The Wire just about sums it up. Pineapple OFC is really the same game as regular OFC, it’s just more fierce.
Big hands, and especially big pairs on top that take you to fantasy land, come in much more often. But many of the same strategic rules still apply.
In a previous piece on setting the first five cards in OFC, I advocate for an aggressive strategy that favors a path to big hands, which takes account of live cards, and tried to keep your starting hand flexible. All of this applies even more so for setting pineapple hands.
Some strategies do change, though.
The Triple Threat
Not only will you be seeing 50% more cards after the first five, but you’ll also get to build your hands two cards at a time. Thus, runner-runner becomes easier to catch, which favors setting flexible starting hands. Open Face Chinese Poker Pineapple Rules
In the above example, you’re getting 50% more cards — to make either a flush, a straight, or even a full house should the s and s start coming. There is no better way to start a pineapple bottom hand than with a two-card straight flush. You’re almost 100% to make at least two pair, thus you can play for fantasy land right away. You’re also one good draw away from having a 15-point bonus draw waiting for you on the bottom. Of course, once you’ve placed that third card on the bottom and chosen a path, the other options fade to black.
Playing the on top here is actually against the norm. It usually goes in the middle, but with this hand in particular, there’s no other way to play for more balance and flexibility. It’s a good hand no matter what comes.
My hand has flexibility, and I keep that flexibility by not committing the bottom hand to a flush draw. Instead I use the draw I received to make a pair in the middle, and to give myself more fantasy land possibilities up top.
I’m immediately rewarded with a live straight-flush draw, unless, of course, my sneaky silicon opponent threw away that without me knowing. Note that he’s working on a straight-flush draw of his own.
The next pull doesn’t get me there, but it does give me two pair in the middle, making the fantasy land draw a real possibility for a consolation prize. In other words, my hand is very live.
Boom! My straight flush hits even though the fantasy land draw misses.
Not all pineapple hands are as exciting at this one, but these kinds of draws are far more common than in regular OFC. In fact, this was the very first hand that I logged against the (still in Alpha) upcoming ABC OFC iPhone App Pineapple version, when starting my marathon match in preparation for this article.
’In Order to Live, You Must Be Willing to Die.’
Those are the words of the late, great Amir Vahedi, who was saying that you’ve got to take risks if you want to win in poker. Pineapple OFC explicitly challenges you to make big hands. If you don’t, you’ll be barbecued by the more experienced and risk-minded players (I’m sorry Ryan Miller, your slow and steady approach won’t work here).
It’s generally much harder to foul in pineapple, to the point where I rarely worry about fouling a hand early. Some of this is obvious. There’s a 100% chance that you can make a small pair or better in the middle, so you can always safely play face cards on top, which you’ll need to do if you want to have a chance at fantasy land. Other gambles are less obvious and would seem downright foolhardy to the seasoned OFC player just learning pineapple.
In this hand, I started with a pretty solid hand but my opponent has a better one, that is until I immediately get a draw. Could I…. no I couldn’t… but really, could I?
I absolutely must play the trip nines in the middle. Why take all that risk? Well, what is my alternative? My opponent has a really good hand. He’s close to 100% to find a second pair (or a live ) for his bottom hand, at which point I’ll need to beat his two-pair or bottom and his middle in order to avoid getting scooped by a very big hand.
Obviously I’ll need either three spades or two tens to qualify on the bottom, but again, what is my alternative? To play one pair of nines? To put a dead up top as my kicker? No chance.
Two draws later, I’m running out of luck. I haven’t improved my upside by making or up top, so even if I make this hand, it won’t necessarily pay big. I also have a choice with the — do I hope for another or two spades on the bottom?Abc Open Face Chinese Poker With Pineapple Juice
This isn’t a math article, so I won’t pretend that I calculated the odds. I chose to root for the , and to keep an outside chance at fantasy land.
On the last draw, I caught the , but I missed my fantasy land draw while my silicon friend made his. Even so, the in the middle was a good move. Look at what I was up against. I needed to take that chance and to try to win a spot against a very good hand.
These kinds of situations come up in pineapple quite often. Try to keep your hand flexible. Put a or up top so you can hit a couple of luck cards and go to fantasy land. Don’t be afraid to take risks. You’ll foul less often than regular OFC conditioning leads you to think, and you’ll often be rewarded.Abc Open Face Chinese Poker With Pineapple Cake
Odds for the Numbers Nerds
In the process of writing this article, I played a 230-hand pineapple OFC match against the computer on my ABC OFC iPhone app. The computer engine uses the same AI that played me within 1/4 point per hand in regular OFC over a long match, with no retraining applied. Thus, the fact that I beat if for +1.8 pt/hand over 230 pineapple hands isn’t that interesting. Chinese Pineapple Poker
What is interesting are some of the side-effect statistics that I collected. Here are the results, in short form below:
*I qualified for fantasy land on 25% of attempts (44/177), while fouling 28% of the time to get there (50/177).
*With the 14-discard-1 fantasy land rule, I stayed in fantasy land on 15% of attempts (8/44), while the CPU stayed on 14% of its attempts (4/25).
*The net value of fantasy land (including cumulative scores for any “stay” hands) was +13.0 pts/hand for me, and +13.8 pts/hand for the computer.
The sample wasn’t huge, but the numbers stabilized very quickly. I’m amazed by the natural summary of the game. We’ve changed several rules for pineapple OFC, some arbitrarily, and yet fantasy land is still worth +13 points.
What’s changed though is that now it’s possible to maintain a foul-to-fantasy land ration that very close to 1:1, while making a large number of fantasy land hands. In regular OFC, I fouled over 30% of my hands to get to Fantasyland on 7.5% of attempts. In pineapple, that kind of risk pays off much more handsomely.
Please comment, or seek me out on Twitter , if you have further interest in these numbers, or if you have equations and derivations to show me about regular or pineapple OFC (which I’m very unlikely to understand).
OFC rules have been contributed by Nikolai Yakovenko. Known as ’Googles,’Yakov
https://diarynote.indered.space
Ang Pineapple OFC ay isang hango ng standard na open-face Chinese poker sa Fantasyland, ang mga panuntunan ay matatagpuan dito. Tulad ng sa regular na OFC, ang manlalaro ay makakakuha ng ilang mga barahailang kapalit, at ilagay ang mga ito n nakahaya hanggang makagawa sila ng isang 13-card hand, na binubuo ng isang ’top’, ’middle,’ at ’bottom” hilera ng tatlo, lima, at limang. And no two hands are ever the same.This app supports Regular and Pineapple Open Face Chinese Poker (OFC), and now with Deuce (2-7) Middle Pineapple, with in-app purchase.We also include hand. Open Face Chinese is one of the newest games that is really starting to take off. It’s vastly different from other forms of poker, such as Texas Hold’em, and can be played with 2-4 players. Players set their hands and play for points - it’s important to declare how much points are worth prior to starting! Here, we introduce the game, and play a few OFC Pineapple rounds, against a computer opponent. A million games are played every week, by poker players around the world. Check us it out on iPhone.
*Abc Open Face Chinese Poker With Pineapples
*Open Face Chinese Poker Pineapple Rules
*Abc Open Face Chinese Poker With Pineapple Juice
*Abc Open Face Chinese Poker With Pineapple Cake
*Chinese Pineapple PokerNikolai Yakovenko
Poker pro Nikolai Yakovenko, co-creator of the ABC Open-Face Chinese Poker iPhone app, returns today to explain the rules of a new, popular variant of OFC, Open-Face Chinese Poker with 2-7 in the Middle.
Open-Face Chinese Poker with 2-7 in the Middle — a.k.a. “2-7 OFC” or “Deuce Pineapple” — is a turn-based card game that is played heads up, or sometimes three-handed. Players take turns, drawing cards and placing them into three separate poker hands. Each of these hands is played face up, meaning that players can see all of the cards that have been played, and these cards can’t be moved between each player’s three poker hands once they have been placed.
The “Deuce” designation means that the middle poker hand is played according to the rankings used in 2-7 lowball, while the other two hands are played as regular “high” poker hands.
The game might sound complicated, but it really isn’t. Deuce Pineapple is now available on the ABC Open-Face Chinese Poker app, for iPhone and iPad. You can practice against our computer AI, or challenge your friends to a turn-based match.
Later this week I’ll return with some discussion of strategy for 2-7 OFC, but today let’s focus on understanding the rules of the game.Three Hands: High, Low, High
The objective of 2-7 Open-Face Chinese is to place 13 cards into three hands: a five-card bottom hand, a five-card middle hand, and a three-card top hand.
As noted, the game plays just like high-only Pineapple OFC, except with the middle played as a 2-7 lowball hand. This means that your bottom hand is a regular five-card poker hand (with flushes, straight and full houses), the top hand is a three-card high hand (including pairs, trips, but no three-card straights or flushes), while the middle hand must contain five low cards with no pairs, no straights, and no flushes. The lower these cards the better.Taking Turns and Discarding
The game is called Open-Face Chinese Poker (or OFC for short) because you’re building these three hands face up a few cards at a time.
As with all Open-Face games, you start by getting dealt five cards and place them all. On subsequent turns (following the procedure used in Pineapple OFC), you get three cards face down and place two of them in any of the available rows (bottom, middle or top). The unused card then gets discarded face down. Discards are out of play, and not shuffled back into the deck, and your opponents are not allowed to see your discards. Therefore there are only enough cards in a deck to play Deuce Pineapple OFC either heads-up or three-handed. Fantasyland
If you make a qualifying hand with kings or better up top, or a wheel — — in the middle, then on the next hand you enter Fantasyland. Just like in high-only Pineapple OFC, in Fantasyland you get 14 cards right away and set 13 of them into three rows face down while discarding one. Your opponents then play out their hands normally, and the result is scored against your hand.
You can stay in Fantasyland, earning another round in this advantageous position, by making a big enough bonus. For Deuce Pineapple you need either trips (three of a kind) on top, a wheel low in the middle, or quads (four of a kind) or better on the bottom to remain in Fantasyland.15-Card Super Fantasyland
In a twist from high-only Pineapple OFC, you can also earn a 15-card “Super Fantasyland” round by qualifying for Fantasyland twice in the same normal hand. Here, for example, the player qualifies for Super Fantasyland by making both aces on top and a wheel in the middle.
This double-bonus is rare, but well worth it. If you stay in Fantasyland, “Super” or otherwise, you get a normal 14-card Fantasyland hand.Qualification and Scoring
To make a qualifying hand, your top hand must be no better (as a normal poker hand) than your bottom hand. And your middle low hand must be at least a ten-low, meaning that your biggest card is no higher than a ten without a pair, a straight, or a flush. As with other Chinese Poker variants, a disqualified or “fouled” hand automatically loses every row.
The three rows are scored against your opponent with the winner of each row getting +1 point. If you win all three rows, this also results in a +3 scoop bonus. In addition to winning, scooping, and possible Fantasyland qualification, you also get points for any bonuses earned by a qualifying hand, even if that hand loses the row.
Bonuses for the bottom hand start with a straight, the low middle hand with a nine-low, and the top row with a pair of sixes. Full bonuses are listed here:Sample Game
That’s a mouthful, but the game is actually quite simple. Even if you haven’t played a lot of 2-7 lowball before, that part of the game is very intuitive. Let’s fly through a quick round of 2-7 OFC, starting with the initial deal of five cards.
Once we’re dealt our first five cards, we place them. Here we’ll put the small ones into our middle low hand.
Next round, we get three cards.
We play two of them in the middle, locking up a seven-low. The is discarded, and is now out of play without the possibility of being returned to the deck.
On the next round, we play the up top, the on the bottom, and discard the .
Skipping ahead, on the last round we catch another ace. Since our bottom hand is three of a kind and thus a bigger hand than a pair of aces, we can play the ace up top for a nice bonus.
We win the top row with aces and the middle row with a seven-low, so we earn +13 in row bonuses. Our opponent wins the bottom row with a full house and earns +13 in bonuses. Thus after all of that, we win a single point.
However, making on top also takes us to Fantasyland. On the next round, we get 14 cards, and place any 13 of them into top, middle, and bottom.
It’s a pretty good hand, with bonuses for an eight-low in the middle, and a flush on the bottom.
We win three points overall, but our opponent makes a wheel in the middle, so on the next hand he will be in Fantasyland. And so it continues...
Later this week I’ll return to share some strategy considerations for Open-Face Chinese Poker with 2-7 in the Middle. Meanwhile, for more OFC strategy advice click here and follow me on Twittter at @ivan_bezdomny.
Get all the latest PokerNews updates on your social media outlets. Follow us on Twitter and find us on both Facebook and Google+!
*TagsNikolai YakovenkoOpen-Face Chinese Pokercash game strategyChinese Poker
*Related PlayersNikolai YakovenkoNikolai Yakovenko
If you’re reading this, I assume that you’ve already played open-face Chinese poker (OFC). Perhaps you’ve even read some of my previous articles on the subject, or have heard me talk about OFC with Kristy Arnett on the Strategy with Kristy Podcast. If you’re not familiar with the rules and basic strategy of standard OFC (with fantasy land), you can read about them here.
However, with all of that OFC rah-rah and experience, pineapple OFC may be something that you’ve just heard mention of, or perhaps seen your favorite poker tweeters bragging about on the Internet. Read on, as I rush through the basics, to how pineapple strategy differs from standard OFC to some of the odds for the numbers-driven crowd.
No one knows whether the pineapple OFC variant is here to stay, and it certainly won’t be the last of the OFC variants that will become popular. It will never become the main set of rules under which OFC is played. At best, pineapple OFC is to pot-limit Omaha what standard OFC is to no-limit hold’em.
But for my money, pineapple OFC is a great game. It’s like regular OFC on steroids, keeping the same game structure, but with great hands coming in twice as often, and in half the rounds. The game can’t be spread four-handed, but it makes for great heads-up and three-way action. It’s more addictive than regular OFC and not a good choice for a game with which to end a poker night, because you’ll no doubt be playing till the wee hours.
It’s also exhausting. With more possible plays on every turn, and with more cards to account for, it’s not a game that you can play on auto-pilot. Even heads up. But enough banter, let’s start with the rules.
One Extra Card, Four Faster Rounds
The first five cards are played the same way as in regular OFC, with players placing their cards in any of the three possible rows, and 13 available spaces. Abc Open Face Chinese Poker With Pineapples
After that, players get three cards in turn, and set two cards as they wish, while discarding the third card. Thus the game is reduced to four rounds of two cards played per round, after the initial five. This differs from standard OFC, in which there are eight rounds of one card placed at a time.
It is customary to place your discarded card face-down, thus adding an awkward hidden-information element that’s absent from regular OFC. On a side note, I think that this is a bad rule, but it’s the way that the game is usually played. The game would be better if players showed all three cards and discarded the unplaced card face-up. This would make it easier to analyze and second-guess how everyone is playing. Friends who are learning the game often ask me about a play, thus revealing their discard. I don’t think this affects the game very much, and it would be more fun if this were standard. Even so, most people play with the third card discarded face-down, and I don’t expect this to change.
Same Cutoffs, but Extra Cards for Fantasy Land
The rules for qualifying for fantasy land are the same as in standard OFC: you need or better on top. Once there, you need either quads on the bottom, a full house in the middle, or trips on top to stay in fantasy land. However, the astute reader will immediately see that fantasy land should be worth much less in a game where players get extra cards and generally make much bigger hands in the course of regular play.
Thus in pineapple OFC, a player in fantasy land gets 14 cards, discards one, and plays his or her best 13-card hand. This may not seem like a huge advantage over regular Fantasyland, but it’s actually quite substantial. Skip to the numbers at the end of this piece to see the details, but for now suffice it to say that 14-card fantasy land in pineapple ends up being worth almost exactly the same as 13-card fantasy land in standard OFC.
Maybe this is an accident, but I think it’s further proof that OFC poker hit some sort of golden ratio when it was invented by those crazy Russians a couple of years back. Somehow giving the fantasy land player one extra card is exactly what it takes to maintain the balance between fantasy land value and regular hand value that makes OFC so much fun.
’The Game Done Changed.’ / ’Game’s the Same, Just Got More Fierce.’
This exchange between Cutty and Slim Charles on Season 3 of The Wire just about sums it up. Pineapple OFC is really the same game as regular OFC, it’s just more fierce.
Big hands, and especially big pairs on top that take you to fantasy land, come in much more often. But many of the same strategic rules still apply.
In a previous piece on setting the first five cards in OFC, I advocate for an aggressive strategy that favors a path to big hands, which takes account of live cards, and tried to keep your starting hand flexible. All of this applies even more so for setting pineapple hands.
Some strategies do change, though.
The Triple Threat
Not only will you be seeing 50% more cards after the first five, but you’ll also get to build your hands two cards at a time. Thus, runner-runner becomes easier to catch, which favors setting flexible starting hands. Open Face Chinese Poker Pineapple Rules
In the above example, you’re getting 50% more cards — to make either a flush, a straight, or even a full house should the s and s start coming. There is no better way to start a pineapple bottom hand than with a two-card straight flush. You’re almost 100% to make at least two pair, thus you can play for fantasy land right away. You’re also one good draw away from having a 15-point bonus draw waiting for you on the bottom. Of course, once you’ve placed that third card on the bottom and chosen a path, the other options fade to black.
Playing the on top here is actually against the norm. It usually goes in the middle, but with this hand in particular, there’s no other way to play for more balance and flexibility. It’s a good hand no matter what comes.
My hand has flexibility, and I keep that flexibility by not committing the bottom hand to a flush draw. Instead I use the draw I received to make a pair in the middle, and to give myself more fantasy land possibilities up top.
I’m immediately rewarded with a live straight-flush draw, unless, of course, my sneaky silicon opponent threw away that without me knowing. Note that he’s working on a straight-flush draw of his own.
The next pull doesn’t get me there, but it does give me two pair in the middle, making the fantasy land draw a real possibility for a consolation prize. In other words, my hand is very live.
Boom! My straight flush hits even though the fantasy land draw misses.
Not all pineapple hands are as exciting at this one, but these kinds of draws are far more common than in regular OFC. In fact, this was the very first hand that I logged against the (still in Alpha) upcoming ABC OFC iPhone App Pineapple version, when starting my marathon match in preparation for this article.
’In Order to Live, You Must Be Willing to Die.’
Those are the words of the late, great Amir Vahedi, who was saying that you’ve got to take risks if you want to win in poker. Pineapple OFC explicitly challenges you to make big hands. If you don’t, you’ll be barbecued by the more experienced and risk-minded players (I’m sorry Ryan Miller, your slow and steady approach won’t work here).
It’s generally much harder to foul in pineapple, to the point where I rarely worry about fouling a hand early. Some of this is obvious. There’s a 100% chance that you can make a small pair or better in the middle, so you can always safely play face cards on top, which you’ll need to do if you want to have a chance at fantasy land. Other gambles are less obvious and would seem downright foolhardy to the seasoned OFC player just learning pineapple.
In this hand, I started with a pretty solid hand but my opponent has a better one, that is until I immediately get a draw. Could I…. no I couldn’t… but really, could I?
I absolutely must play the trip nines in the middle. Why take all that risk? Well, what is my alternative? My opponent has a really good hand. He’s close to 100% to find a second pair (or a live ) for his bottom hand, at which point I’ll need to beat his two-pair or bottom and his middle in order to avoid getting scooped by a very big hand.
Obviously I’ll need either three spades or two tens to qualify on the bottom, but again, what is my alternative? To play one pair of nines? To put a dead up top as my kicker? No chance.
Two draws later, I’m running out of luck. I haven’t improved my upside by making or up top, so even if I make this hand, it won’t necessarily pay big. I also have a choice with the — do I hope for another or two spades on the bottom?Abc Open Face Chinese Poker With Pineapple Juice
This isn’t a math article, so I won’t pretend that I calculated the odds. I chose to root for the , and to keep an outside chance at fantasy land.
On the last draw, I caught the , but I missed my fantasy land draw while my silicon friend made his. Even so, the in the middle was a good move. Look at what I was up against. I needed to take that chance and to try to win a spot against a very good hand.
These kinds of situations come up in pineapple quite often. Try to keep your hand flexible. Put a or up top so you can hit a couple of luck cards and go to fantasy land. Don’t be afraid to take risks. You’ll foul less often than regular OFC conditioning leads you to think, and you’ll often be rewarded.Abc Open Face Chinese Poker With Pineapple Cake
Odds for the Numbers Nerds
In the process of writing this article, I played a 230-hand pineapple OFC match against the computer on my ABC OFC iPhone app. The computer engine uses the same AI that played me within 1/4 point per hand in regular OFC over a long match, with no retraining applied. Thus, the fact that I beat if for +1.8 pt/hand over 230 pineapple hands isn’t that interesting. Chinese Pineapple Poker
What is interesting are some of the side-effect statistics that I collected. Here are the results, in short form below:
*I qualified for fantasy land on 25% of attempts (44/177), while fouling 28% of the time to get there (50/177).
*With the 14-discard-1 fantasy land rule, I stayed in fantasy land on 15% of attempts (8/44), while the CPU stayed on 14% of its attempts (4/25).
*The net value of fantasy land (including cumulative scores for any “stay” hands) was +13.0 pts/hand for me, and +13.8 pts/hand for the computer.
The sample wasn’t huge, but the numbers stabilized very quickly. I’m amazed by the natural summary of the game. We’ve changed several rules for pineapple OFC, some arbitrarily, and yet fantasy land is still worth +13 points.
What’s changed though is that now it’s possible to maintain a foul-to-fantasy land ration that very close to 1:1, while making a large number of fantasy land hands. In regular OFC, I fouled over 30% of my hands to get to Fantasyland on 7.5% of attempts. In pineapple, that kind of risk pays off much more handsomely.
Please comment, or seek me out on Twitter , if you have further interest in these numbers, or if you have equations and derivations to show me about regular or pineapple OFC (which I’m very unlikely to understand).
OFC rules have been contributed by Nikolai Yakovenko. Known as ’Googles,’Yakov
https://diarynote.indered.space
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