Pineapple Open Face Chinese: Stats on the Top 20 Players

After more than 2,500 hands being submitted to our simulator, and over 10,000 tactics being played on our Tactics Trainer, I decided to take a look at the top 20 players on our site – openfacesolutions.com.

Let me quickly explain the two data points: Error Rate and Percent Correct, in more detail:

Error Rate is the difference between your answer and the right answer in terms of in-game points.

Think of this as your average distance from hitting the bull’s-eye on a dart board. The further away you are, the more you missed. Add up all of your shots distances away from the center and average them, and you have your error rate.

Percent Correct is the percentage of times you got an error rate of zero. It’s simply how many darts hit the bulls-eye divided by how many you threw. How many times were you 100 percent correct?

Quite frankly, we should only really care about our error rate, and keeping that as close to zero as possible. It’s not like darts, whereby being off the bulls-eye by a millimeter means you completely missed your mark. But it’s nice to measure and study our percent correct and see if there is any correlation between the two.

Data Point 1 – Error Rate

Of the top 20 players, the average error rate –– is .38. This means that every time an expert is faced with a tough decision, they miss on average by about one third of a point.

What can we learn from this?

First, we can tell that no one is playing perfect Pineapple Open Face Chinese right now, not even close. This is good news, because if someone had magically solved this really complex game, that would make it a bit dull for the rest of us.

Second, we know that novices are likely making big mistakes. This is good for you if you are a professional. As long as you keep your error rate below your opponents, you should profit long term. Pretty simple right? Kind of the “Theory of Poker” philosophy applied to OFC.

When looking through our whole database, the average player is making just over one point in error per tough situation, so there are plenty of people getting it wrong. Whether or not they will play with you for real money is a different story, of course.

Third, I can see that there is a big difference between the Top of the Top and the Bottom of the Top. Our best user, TripsUpTop, is crushing it with an outstanding .26 error rate, while me, the guy that made the simulator, is barely on the board with a .48 error rate. This means he is about twice as good as me, and I am probably about twice as good as an average player.

This is why the best of the best make so much more money than the next level expert. It’s because they beat other experts, and crush novices. You’re going to win more when you win vs. everyone you play!

Data Point 2 – Percent Correct

Of the top 20 players, each player only answered the tactic correctly 70 percent of the time on average.

Wow, it would appear we’ve got a bunch of C- players here… But of course this doesn’t tell the whole story, does it?

What can we learn from this?

First, we can see that errors are being made a lot, but some of them may not matter that much. I have spoken about this in past articles, but:

When you are facing a tough decision, you may be better off moving quickly rather than slowly pondering which play is right.

The reason is because some of the more trivial decisions barely affect your expected value (EV), but slowing down the game may prevent your opponents from making bigger mistakes later. After all, time is the only true thing we have. So keep the tempo high when you can, and you will win faster.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, it’s not the frequency of mistakes you make, it’s the size of them. If you misplay a card that, oopsie, has three dead cards on the board, rather than a card that has two dead cards, you probably only made a small error. But if you gamble for Fantasyland with only two live outs, and you are risking a full house on the bottom, you are probably making a massive error.

Avoiding the big mistakes will boost your win rate by half or better, and don’t fret about the little ones. If you are playing for $5 a point and make a .1 point error, it only cost you 50 cents. But those three point mistakes—which we all still make—will cost you $15. So, we could say, it’s about 30 times more important to avoid big mistakes than worry about small mistakes.

Correlation (whatever that means)

I went ahead and did a quick correlation study between Error Rate and Percent Correct and got .55. After learning more about correlation on the “correleation for dummies” website (literally), I found out that this means that the lower your error rate, the more likely you are to have a higher percentage correct score (makes sense).

But this is only a slight correlation, not an absolute correlation, which seems to justify what I said earlier about needing to remove big errors from your game, because it doesn’t matter how many you get right or wrong, just how far away from the bulls-eye you are shooting on average.

The difference between an expert and a novice seems to mainly lie in knowing those complicated “gamble” spots where it feels close, but one play is way, way better than the other.

Side note: This is actually great news for me, because my simulator really helps solve this specific problem in your game. (How convenient that my finds are good for my business…)

3 More Stats that You are Dying to Learn About

Now, I’m betting you thought I was going to talk about FantasyLand Percent, Foul Percent, and Royalties Per Hand as those are the three stats that people ask me about all the time, but I don’t have that data on anyone but myself… yet.

So to collect that data, I am going to need your help. What I would like you to do is Tweet your stats to me at @OFCStrategy and I will report back my findings (please also tell me your number of hands played). And if you want to keep it private, message it to me instead.

To find those stats, go into your Pineapple app (the yellow pineapple with sunglasses one) and from the home screen, click on your name. You should see them there. Either screenshot that and Tweet it to me, or just type those numbers into your Tweet.
My stats over about 2,000 hands are:

Royalties per Hand: 5.8
FantasyLand percent: 17.4 percent
Foul percent: 16.2 percent

Can you do better than that? What would better than that even look like?

I know that as your FantasyLand percent goes up, your Foul percent goes up as well, but if your Royalties per Hand goes up at the same time is that all that matters?

Well, it’s tricky, and, while I have thought about it at great length, I’m not quite sure what the answer is just yet. We will dive into all of that and more after I am able to compile all of this for you and report back my findings.

Until next time, you know where to find me. See you guys next time. ♠

Derric “SixPeppers” Haynie is the author of Quantum Poker and creator of OpenFaceSolutions.com and OpenFaceStrategy.com. Check out those sites for more articles, solutions, tactics, news and information on Pineapple Open Face Chinese Poker.