Open Face Chinese Poker is growing in popularity around the world, it is derived from Chinese Poker but all cards are dealt face up and not all at once. Both Open Face Chinese and Chinese Poker employ standard Poker hand rankings. One feature of both Open Face Chinese and Chinese Poker is that 13 cards are dealt out to each player. Additionally, you also have to form three hands of increasing rank from front to back, of 5,5 and 3 cards.
OFC-10 (10-card Open Face Chinese) is a variation where players are dealt 10 cards instead of 13 and they are invited to make two, 5-card poker hands. While OFC-10 employs most of the terminology employed in standard OFC, including royalties, it however encompasses a number of adjustment that were obligatory given that only two, 5-card hands are tabled.
I would like to invite you to follow the link at the bottom of this blog entry and review the complete rules for OFC-10, should you wish to distribute I would appreciate an acknowledgement. Also if you do play this variation I would be interested to hear from you regarding your experiences with the game.
Now let’s go back to 13-card Open Face Chinese poker.
The game is really fun to play and very addictive, there isn’t any actual betting involved, but players score points for various hand combinations. Online gambling variations associate 1 point scored with a value, say 1 point equals $1 or 1 point equals $5. Still this game is not about bluffing since everyone sees the cards as they come out. To win, or at least play decently, you need to have keen observation skills and a modicum of familiarity with basic probability to quickly assess your chances of, for instance, completing a full-house on the back hand.
Luck plays a significant role in this game, since the cards peeled of the top of the deck will tend to dictate the strength of your final hand. Still a player must remain attentive not to unwittingly put himself in an unsavory corner, or play cards in such a way as to end up with a foul hand.
Here are two examples of OFC hands, the one on the left is a valid hand, the one on the right is a “foul” hand and would lose automatically.
| Example A – Valid OFC Hand | | Example B – A “Foul” hand | |||||||||
| FRNT | 2s | 2h | Kd | - | - | | Ad | Ah | 9s | - | - |
| MIDD | 9d | 9c | 5h | 6h | 7h | | Qh | Qs | 2d | 6s | 8c |
| BACK | 10c | Jd | Qd | Kh | As | | 4c | 4d | Jh | Js | 3s |
Let us consider Example “A” above. The player has an Ace-high straight on the Back hand, which is his highest hand. The middle hand shows a pair of nines and the Front hand a pair of twos. Since the strenght of the hands decreases back to front, this is a valid OFC hand. In Example “B”, the player has made two pair on the Back hand, a pair of Queens on his Middle hand but a pair of Aces on this Front hand. Since the Front hand is effectively higher than the Middle hand, this renders the overall hand invalid and hence a “foul” hand.
Some possible gaming consideration
Building a winning hand depends on a number of factors, obviously the stronger your Back hand the higher are you chances of winning. Yet it is more important to ensure that you end up with an overall valid hand first and foremost.
Placing your initial 5 cards on your final layout is also an important aspect of any OFC poker hand. In fact laying those cards will inevitably impact the way you will build your 13 cards into a valid OFC hand.
Starting with 4 cards in one suit, or 4 cards to an up and down straight.
Before evaluating your hand, it may be a good idea for you to keep an eye open for cards that might effect you among the 5 cards tabled by your other opponents. As in other forms of poker, the player who lays his cards last on his spread will be in a better situation to decide what hand he can or cannot complete.
If on receiving your 5 cards you realize that you have four cards in one suit, and none of your opponents has any similar suited cards in their layout, then you should aim for a flush on your Back Hand. Likewise if you realize that you are dealt 4 cards to a straight, and none of the cards you need are in the layouts tabled by your opponents, then you should aim to complete a straight on your Back Hand.
| Front | Points | Middle | Points | Back | Points |
| 66 | 1 | Three of a kind | 2 | Straight | 2 |
| 77 | 2 | Straight | 4 | Flush | 4 |
| 88 | 3 | Flush | 8 | Full house | 6 |
| 99 | 4 | Full house | 12 | Four of a kind | 10 |
| TT | 5 | Four of a kind | 20 | Straight flush | 15 |
| JJ | 6 | Straight flush | 30 | Royal flush | 25 |
| QQ | 7 | Royal flush | 50 | ||
| KK | 8 | ||||
| AA | 9 | ||||
| Trips | 20 |
Table 1 - Royalties in Open Face Chinese Poker
That’s just about all I have to say about this variation for now, please feel free to click on the link below to try out my 10-card OFC variation. Feedback as stated earlier would be most appreciated.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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