Derric Haynie: The Basics of Pineapple Open-Face Chinese Poker

While I’ve been writing about traditional open-face Chinese (OFC), there was a new variant of the game hitting the tables, and it looks like it has taken over in popularity. Pineapple open-face Chinese (POFC) is the three-card draw variant to original open-face, where after setting your first five cards, you now draw three cards, play two and discard one, instead of just drawing one card at a time. This turns out to add deep levels of complexity to the game, as well as more variance, and more opportunities to make a profitable “gamble.” It’s very similar to the difference between no-limit hold’em and pot-limit Omaha, (PLO), except in the open-face world, once you go POFC, you aren’t very likely to go back (some might argue the same for PLO).

The key differences of pineapple open-face are (in order of importance):

• 17 Cards, Not 13 – if you hadn’t realized it already, you see four more cards, giving the final hands exponentially greater strength than their traditional OFC cousins. This is great, because after playing OFC for a while, average hand strength seems to be pretty stagnant, and good gambles are few and far between; it’s hard to make big hands, and you don’t even hit fantasyland but a few percent of the time. Here you have more profitable gambling opportunities, and you make bigger hands on average, hence at least double the variance of traditional OFC.

• Seeing Three At a Time – Seeing more of your hand at once allows for better decision-making and better planning. Should you go for a flush or pair your bottom? Well, maybe you draw two flush cards, or maybe you draw two-pair; in traditional that wasn’t even possible. Also, pairing the middle at the same time as the top is pretty common; in traditional you would have to pair the top and be “all-in” — you must improve to avoid fouling — before knowing your next card. Sometimes in POFC, it’s not even a gamble as you already have the cards you need to lock up a stronger hand in the middle simultaneously.

• Play Two, Hide One – In traditional OFC there was no hidden information, but in POFC you see three cards and have to discard one, so you will often be given the opportunity to hide valuable information from your opponent. Even though it’s just a blocker or two, it adds a whole new layer of complexity to the game, aligning it more with other hidden information games like hold ‘em.

• Gambling Properly – You are legitimately supposed to take big risks in POFC, even early on when it would have been suicidal in traditional OFC. Yet, the difference between a great gamble and a poor gamble can still often be just one or two dead cards, and if your opponent can’t pick up on when it’s the right time, or if they don’t study the game enough, they will likely make some big mistakes. That means you should be able to make more money at this game than traditional OFC, but it’s going to take more work to learn how to play well.

• Fantasyland – POFC fantasyland is a little different than traditional. Instead of getting 13 cards, you get 14 cards and have to discard one, thus increasing the average hand strength of your fantasyland hand. Also, if you were playing full house in the middle stays in fantasyland for traditional, that rule is generally off the table in POFC. But the most important thing to know about fantasyland is that it’s not nearly as valuable in POFC. Traditional OFC fantasyland is valued between 11-to-13 points depending on opponent, whereas it’s only worth 6.5-to-8 in POFC. This is just one part to the adjustment you need to make to your calculations before deciding to take big risks such as setting yourself all-in.

• Complexity – Another interesting part to POFC is that there are fewer turns, which means playing on your phone with a friend gets you through games a bit faster because there is less waiting for them to pick up their phone and get back to you. At first glance you might think fewer turns means less complexity, but that is not the case in POFC. In the traditional game if you drew one card after both players set their hand, you would be drawing one out of the 42 remaining cards in the deck, meaning there are 42 different next street possibilities. You would only be able to place that card in one of a maximum of three spots, giving you 126 different permutations — ways the next card can play out. In POFC, you draw three cards, giving you: 42*41*40 equals 68,880 next street possibilities, and you have a maximum of 27 different ways to set those three cards, giving you a total of 1,859,760 permutations. Traditional OFC has about 9*10^45 different end game positions, which is “just a little” more than the number of moves in a (40-move max) chess game. POFC has 3.8*10^60 different possible moves, which makes it 400 trillion times more complex than traditional OFC. You can see why POFC is now the game of choice when playing open-face; more choices usually means more fun, more of a challenge, and more room for mistakes. This added complexity allows the good player to make better choices and the bad player to make worse ones, even if it is accompanied by more variance (again, this is very similar to the relationship between no-limit and PLO).

Conclusions

So what does this new game mean for you? Firstly, you should play smaller stakes relative to your bankroll, as $5 per point pineapple is at least as big as $10 per point traditional. Secondly, you should expect the learning curve to be steeper. It will take more time to become an expert, and you will still likely be learning nuances for years to come. Thirdly, you should expect to take bigger risks in-game. You will need to set aggressively up top and in the middle, and that is fine because you’re going to make your bottom hand with a much higher frequency. And finally, due to the nature of POFC, I believe it’s even more important than traditional OFC to study the math, otherwise you will continue to make big mistakes over and over. Learn your odds and outs, do some risk/reward calculations, and, if you are serious about the game, get your hands on a simulator (I am currently building one that should be available for public use soon). Until then, you can start off by downloading my POFC odds charts at www.solvingofc.com. In the next article I will do some risk/reward calculations and review a few of POFC’s trouble situations. ´

Derric “SixPeppers” Haynie is the author of Quantum Poker and owner of solvingofc.com. For more articles, OFC solution apps, and information on Open-Face Chinese Poker, check out his website: www.solvingofc.com – dedicated to your
open-face education.

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