Taiwanese poker vs Pineapple OFC
Both games use a top, a middle, and a bottom. The resemblance stops there. Taiwanese is a two-board community-card game. Pineapple OFC is sequential row-building with a foul rule.
OFC Lab ships both because players sit both. It does not reuse OFC ordering, fouling, royalties, or Fantasyland inside the Taiwanese engine. An OFC habit like “never put trips on top” will mis-set a Taiwanese hand.
The 52-card rules below follow Phenom Poker’s Taiwanese Poker rules. The optional 54-card deck with two jokers is a labelled custom extension in OFC Lab, not a published Phenom rule.
Side-by-side
| Pineapple OFC | Taiwanese poker | |
|---|---|---|
| Private cards | 13 placed (5, then 3×2) plus discards | 7, all known at once |
| Board layout | 3 / 5 / 5 on your felt | 1 / 2 / 4, used on two shared boards |
| Community cards | None | Two 5-card boards |
| Hand types | 3-card top, 5-card poker rows | 1-card hold’em, 2-card hold’em, 4-card Omaha |
| Order / foul | Bottom ≥ middle ≥ top or you foul | No row-order rule, no foul |
| Bonus round | Fantasyland | None |
| Sweep bonus | +3 for winning all three rows | +8 for winning all six row/board comparisons |
| Typical field | Heads-up or 3-way | 2–6 players |
How Taiwanese is set
You receive seven private cards and partition them once:
- Top — one card. One-card hold’em on each board (your card plus five community; best five-card hand). Worth 1 point per board you win.
- Middle — two cards. Ordinary hold’em. Worth 2 points per board you win.
- Bottom — four cards. Omaha: use exactly two hole cards and exactly three board cards. Worth 3 points per board you win.
There are exactly 7 × C(6,2) = 105 legal 1 / 2 / 4 partitions. That finite list is why a Taiwanese solver can enumerate every set and roll the boards out, instead of searching a Pineapple street tree.
You set before the boards are fully known. There is no discard after the set, and you never place a street in the OFC sense.
How Taiwanese is scored
Each opponent is settled independently. For each of the two boards you compare top, middle, and bottom:
- Win the top on a board: +1. Lose: −1. Tie: 0.
- Win the middle: +2 / −2 / 0.
- Win the bottom: +3 / −3 / 0.
That is six comparisons (3 rows × 2 boards). Win all six outright and you receive an additional +8. A single tie anywhere blocks that bonus. Heads-up, the theoretical range is −20 to +20 (16 from the rows, plus or minus the 8-point bonus).
There are no OFC royalties and no Fantasyland value. A royal flush on the bottom is a bottom win unless it also helps you sweep.
Why OFC habits fail here
Trips belong wherever they score the most. There is no order rule to protect. A singleton ace on top is a hold’em kicker, not an OFC pair-royalty project.
Bottom is Omaha, not a 5-card OFC row. Four to a flush with no pairing backup can be a weak Omaha holding. OFC players overvalue “pretty” four-card bottoms that do not use two hole cards well.
You cannot foul. There is no −6 penalty to play around. The failure mode is a dominated 1 / 2 / 4 split that loses the expensive bottom on both boards.
Multiway is the default. OFC Lab’s Taiwanese solver runs 2–6 players. Hero’s score is the sum of pairwise settlements. A set that is best heads-up can be wrong six-handed because the +8 sweep is rarer and the bottom is contested more often.
Jokers
The standard game is a 52-card deck. OFC Lab also offers a 54-card variant with two distinct, fully wild jokers. Each joker becomes the strongest conventional five-card hand available after the row’s card-use rule is applied. It cannot duplicate a physical card, and five of a kind is not in the ranking. A joker on a shared board may resolve differently for each player. Treat that deck as a custom mode unless your room has posted the same rule.
How the Taiwanese solver works
The engine keeps all 105 sets and evaluates them with Monte Carlo rollouts. Every candidate sees the same opponent cards and the same future boards in a given sample (common random numbers). Each opponent sets from only their own seven cards. Reported intervals keep the correlation between the two boards.
Opponent policy is an explicit population model, not a Nash solution. Balanced is the general-purpose default. Home-run and bottom-heavy policies are sensitivity checks; random is a weak baseline. If your live table only bombs the bottom, run that policy.
One completed Taiwanese rollout is one solve, same as a Trainer line or a Fantasyland analysis.
Which product surface to open
In the OFC Lab desktop app, Taiwanese is its own screen, next to Trainer and Library. It is included in the 14-day / 25-solve trial. After the trial it is a High Roller feature ($99/month or $990/year), along with 2-7 Pineapple, the joker OFC format, and library generation. Pro ($49/month or $490/year) keeps the high-middle Pineapple family and the OFC Trainer but not Taiwanese.
If you meant Pineapple OFC — three rows, discards, Fantasyland — start with the OFC rules guide. If you sit both games, keep the two solvers separate.