What is Open Face Chinese poker?
Open Face Chinese poker (OFC) is a point game of placement. You build three poker hands in public, street by street, and get paid for winning rows — or docked for stacking them in the wrong order.
There is no pot and no betting street. Each finished board scores against every other player’s board. The skill is deciding where each card goes while opponents can still see your empty seats.
This article covers the shared skeleton: three rows, thirteen cards, the foul rule, and the scoop. Pineapple OFC adds a discard and Fantasyland. Royalties and scoring are a separate layer. OFC Lab solves the Pineapple family plus the Taiwanese two-board game.
The three rows
Every player ends the hand with thirteen cards arranged as:
- Top (front): three cards. Ranked as high card, a pair, or trips. No straights or flushes on top.
- Middle: five cards. A standard high poker hand in regular OFC. In 2-7 Pineapple the middle is a deuce-to-seven low instead.
- Bottom (back): five cards. Always a standard high poker hand.
The order rule is the whole game. In high-middle formats the finished board must satisfy bottom ≥ middle ≥ top. A pair of aces is a monster on top and a weak middle; on the bottom it is often a missed royalty.
Placed cards stay put. In live OFC and Pineapple, you do not rearrange at the end. The only unused card comes from Pineapple’s discard.
How a hand is dealt
Classic (non-Pineapple) OFC deals five cards face down to start. Each player sets those five, then places one face-up card per street until every row is full.
Pineapple OFC keeps the five-card opener, then deals three cards per street. You place two and discard one. After the opener plus three later streets you still have thirteen cards on the board. The discard — and the extra information — is what makes the game worth studying.
Fantasyland, Progressive, Ultimate, and 2-7 sit on that Pineapple skeleton. They change bonus-round card counts, how the middle ranks, or whether jokers are in the deck. You still build one 3-card top and two 5-card rows.
What is a foul?
A foul is an illegal finished board. In the high-middle games OFC Lab solves (Pineapple, Progressive, Ultimate Progressive, and Ultimate + Progressive + Jokers), that means the middle outranks the bottom, or the top outranks the middle.
Examples that foul:
- Bottom is queens-up, middle is aces-up.
- Middle is a pair of eights, top is a pair of nines.
- Bottom is a king-high flush, middle is an ace-high flush.
A fouled board scores no royalties and does not contest the rows. In OFC Lab’s scoring, the fouling player pays a 6-point foul penalty plus the opponent’s royalties (and any Fantasyland value on that opponent’s board). If both foul, the hand is a wash: zero.
Strong players still take calculated foul risk — for example parking a strong top pair while the middle is two cards from a pair that might not arrive. The Trainer prices that risk; it does not pretend fouls never happen.
Row wins and the scoop
When both boards are legal, each row is compared independently:
- Win a row: +1
- Lose a row: −1
- Tie a row: 0
Win all three rows and you also take a +3 scoop bonus (the opponent pays −3). A clean scoop without royalties is 6 points: three row wins plus the bonus. That is why the foul penalty is also 6 — it matches giving up a scoop on the rows, before royalties.
Royalties sit on top of row points. A player who loses two rows but makes a full house on the bottom can still win the hand. Scoop versus royalty is the main strategic fork in OFC, which is why solvers report expected value in points, not hands won.
In a multiway pot each opponent is settled separately. Scooping one player and splitting another is normal. OFC Lab’s multiway Trainer grades heads-up or three-way lines street-by-street against each opponent’s policy.
OFC vs closed Chinese poker
Closed Chinese poker deals thirteen cards all at once. You arrange them in private, then table the board. There is still a top / middle / bottom and a foul rule, but no sequential information and no discard street.
OFC places most cards in public. Opponents react, and later streets are chosen with a partial board already locked. Opening-set libraries exist because the first five cards in Pineapple are the closest OFC gets to a closed puzzle — and even then six more placements and two discards remain.
Taiwanese poker is a third game: seven hole cards split 1 / 2 / 4 and scored on two community boards, with no OFC row-order rule. See Taiwanese poker vs Pineapple OFC.
What to learn first
- Memorize the order rule until fouling feels like a physical mistake.
- Learn the royalty tables for top pairs, middle trips+, and bottom straights+.
- Play Pineapple until the discard is automatic — the third card of a street is often the whole decision.
- Learn Fantasyland qualification (QQ or better on top in regular Pineapple) before stretching for it.
- Then branch into Progressive, Ultimate, or 2-7. Those formats reuse the same rows with different bonuses.
Rules alone do not tell you whether a thin QQ top is worth the Fantasyland ticket, or whether a 0.4-point opening error is a 2-point error after later streets. That is what the Trainer and Library are for.
Where OFC Lab fits
OFC Lab is a Windows 10/11 desktop app. It solves five Pineapple OFC formats and the Taiwanese two-board game on your machine. Solves never upload your cards. A new account gets 25 free solves over 14 days, no card required. Pro is $49/month (or $490/year) for Pineapple, Progressive, Ultimate Progressive, Fantasyland analysis, and the multiway Trainer. High Roller is $99/month (or $990/year) and adds 2-7, the joker format, Taiwanese, and local library generation.
It is a study tool. Using any solver in real time at an online table violates site rules and OFC Lab’s terms.