How to Play Open Face Chinese Poker (OFC): Complete Rules & Scoring Guide

Open Face Chinese Poker (OFC) is a poker variant with no betting rounds — instead, you're racing to build the strongest possible three-hand layout using all 13 of your cards, without breaking a simple but unforgiving rule. Here's everything you need to know to play your first hand.

The Basics: Three Hands, One Board

Up to three players can compete at the same table. Each player arranges 13 cards into three separate hands:

• Top (3 cards)

• Middle (5 cards)

• Bottom (5 cards)

Once a card is placed into one of these three rows, it's locked in — you can't move it later.

How a Hand Plays Out

1. You're dealt 5 cards to start and place all of them across your three rows.

2. Over the next 4 rounds, you're dealt 3 cards at a time — you keep 2 and discard 1 each round.

3. By the end, you've placed 13 cards total (5 + 2×4).

Every round, all players place their cards at the same time — you won't see what your opponents played until the round is complete. Once everyone's done, the round is revealed, and you move to the next one together.

The Golden Rule: Bottom Beats Middle Beats Top

Your Bottom hand must rank higher than your Middle, and your Middle must rank higher than your Top. If your rows are out of order, your hand fouls — and you score zero across all three rows for that hand, no exceptions.

Scoring

Middle-hand bonuses are always double the Bottom-hand bonus for the same hand type:

Hand Type	Bottom Bonus	Middle Bonus
Three of a Kind	+0	+2
Straight	+2	+4
Flush	+4	+8
Full House	+6	+12
Four of a Kind	+10	+20
Straight Flush	+15	+30
Royal Flush	+25	+50

Top-row bonuses run from a pair of 6s (+1) up to a pair of Aces (+9), then jump to three-of-a-kind — from 222 (+10) up to AAA (+22). Beat an opponent across all three rows and you get a Scoop bonus of +3.

Fantasyland

Get a pair of Queens or better in your Top hand, and you unlock Fantasyland — you get all your cards face-down at once to arrange freely while opponents finish their hand normally. In Regular OFC, that's a flat 14 cards. In Progressive OFC, the stronger your qualifying hand, the more cards you get — up to 15, 16, or 17.

Other Ways to Play

This guide covers the core OFC flow, but there's more than one way to play:

• Regular OFC deals one card at a time with no discards, instead of the 3-keep-2 flow above.

• Progressive OFC scales your Fantasyland card count with how strong your qualifying hand was, instead of a flat 14.

• Joker variant adds 2 wild cards to the deck, which can complete whatever hand you need.

You can practice all of these variants — Regular, Pineapple, Progressive, and Joker — in the OFC Poker & Blackjack 21 app.