He plays almost perfect Open Face Chinese Poker after the 6th card. Unsolicited Testimonials. Pineapple Mode: Pineapple Mode: Pineapple Mode: Pineapple Mode. 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 them face-up until they make a 13-card hand, consisting of a 'top,' 'middle,' and 'bottom' row of three, five, and five cards, respectively.

“Am I making the right move?” This is what I ask myself before I take each and every turn in Pineapple OFC. According to my score on the rating system (that I helped create), the answer is: not every time. I only get about 70 percent of tough situations correct, and have an average error of .5 points / tricky spot. This means I probably give my opponent a free point every couple of hands. With that kind of error rate, how could I even be expect to win? Well, luckily, my opponents are making even more errors than me.

The truth is we are all making a lot of mistakes in this fairly new game and unexplored game. That’s great for the fast learners, but could cost you a pretty penny if you are a late-bloomer or haven’t yet put in the effort to learn advanced OFC strategy. Let me show you four of the biggest mistakes I see players just like you make in this game time and time again:

Not Gambling for FantasyLand Enough

Sometimes the fear and embarrassment of fouling convinces you to play it safe in spots where it is clearly “game on.” You have to remember, it’s not whether you hit 50 percent of the time or more, it’s whether you make more points on average or not. Most Fantasyland gambles only need 25 percent to be worth it, so stop waiting for the golden opportunity and just go.

In this spot, gambling for Fantasyland is 2.6 points better on average than playing it safe. And it doesn’t particularly even matter that our opponent will foul a significant amount of the time because our hand is just plainly better on average if we make the gamble. If you aren’t making “risky” plays in Pineapple Open Face, you are making a mistake.

Completely Senseless Gambles

Just because you can improve doesn’t mean you should. I see this problem a lot when someone has set a rather ambitious flush draw or straight draw in the middle, but hasn’t developed their back at all. It’s especially true when you hit your trips card in the middle with just one, or even two pair, in the back. This is quite often a bad time to gamble.

In this situation, putting the ace up front forces you into a runner-runner situation, where you have to make a full house on the bottom and two pair or better in the middle. That is a dream my friend, and it’s a mistake of over seven points! Do not take a good hand and throw it away simply for a chance at “the big time.”

Bailing Too Early

If you are mid-game and thinking about breaking a three-flush for a single pair in the back, you better need a really good reason. A reason like, half your flush cards are dead, you can get to Fantasyland a lot easier if you pair the back, or you will scoop your opponent a lot even with such a weak hand. Most of the time, it’s just correct to wait it out for the flush, or bail on the next street. After all, there will be six more opportunities to hit something that helps you out, just be patient.

In this hand, it can be sometimes tempting to just play it safe and put the ten in the back, especially if there are more dead diamonds. But that is just way too safe, even with 3-4 additional dead diamonds! The correct play in this exact spot is actually to gamble for Fantasyland with the queen up front and ten in the middle (because of the three of diamonds…think about it). If you are playing it “super safe” you are making a mistake of over four points, yikes.

A bird in the hand…Don’t sacrifice a great card for the back to take a big risk in the front.

Now there are plenty of times to gamble in this game, but I have found that most of the time you are presented a made hand, you should take that before risking it all for Fantasyland or the like. This problem usually arises when you get three great cards for your hand and still have to throw one (or as I like to call it, “rich people problems.”) Generally speaking, you should build the bottom/middle in this situation and throw your “gamble” card. The main reason this holds true so often is because you are throwing away an out, thus reducing your chances, plus you will have another opportunity to hit that Fantasyland card on the next draw anyways. So think about those future opportunities before throwing a perfectly good hand away.

In this situation, we have to decide whether to take Fantasyland now or take quads now… #richpeopleproblems. We don’t even have to set ourselves all-in and Fantasyland is worth approximately 14.5 points (7 for queens and around 7.5 for the added value of being in Fantasyland next hand), while quads is only worth ten points. Seems like a no brainer right? Well, actually, since we have five outs to hit Fantasyland on the next draw (45%), its 4.7 points better to play quads!!! Am I blowing your mind yet?

If any of this helped you or if I was able to help you solve one leak in your game, please let me know by tweeting at @ofcstrategy. I truly hope I was able to give some quick pointers and valuable insight into errors that I see players making all the time. To see where you stand and how many errors you’re making on a regular basis, check out openfacesolutions.com and sign up for a free trial to use our tactics trainer, simulator, and the only Open Face Chinese ranking system on the web. ♠

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.

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.”

Pineapple Open Face Chinese Poker online, free

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

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.

Open Face Chinese Poker Pineapple Juice

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.

Open Face Chinese Poker Pineapple Game Desire

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.

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.