NoMercy OFC Crash Course: Opening With Straights (Part 2)

Welcome to my personal blog on OFC Pineapple (Open Face Chinese Poker). Week after week, we’ll go over the history of the game, basic rules and recommendations, anecdotes from the players, more advanced strategies, hand analysis, and more. Today it’s opening with Straights. Stay tune and enjoy the Fantasy-ride!

As explained earlier, we are now covering a crucial subject in OFC: your openings. The way you will chose to place your initial 5 cards will be the foundation of your hand and it represents a key decision.

Remember that one of the ultimate goals in Chinese Poker is to reach Fantasyland, so starting with the most effective placement will greatly help you get there! We’ll see how to handle opening with Straights.

We are studying optimum openings in order of the highest starting hands by ranking, and we already covered the top poker hands:

• Royal Flushes
• Straight Flushes
• Quads
• Full Houses
• Flushes

Last week, we started reviewing the next category of openings: Opening with Straights and Straight Draws.

We looked deeper into the first possibility of 5 Cards Straight served in opening: Six-high to Jack-high Straights.

Let’s now move to the next possible scenario in this category:

Possibility Number 2: Ace to 5 Straights

In this very particular case, you should split this made hand in order to place your Ace in the middle. It is quite probable that you had the gut instinct to play it this way on some occasions, but decided not to go through with it…

Well, your instincts were right; it is ultimately the best play to split your Straight and play 2-3-4-5 in the back while placing the Ace in the middle.

Let’s analyse this deeper to understand this unique scenario:

• With this play, accessing Fantasyland will become way easier and you still have lots of outs to complete your Straight in the back (A-A-A-6-6-6-6).
• This leaves you with 89% chances of hitting one of these 7 outs before the end of the hand with still 12 cards to come.
• Your only difficult decision will occur when you receive a second Ace while all 6s are still live, and if they are indeed all live, you should go on by placing this second Ace in the middle to pair your first one.

All in all, you should not waste that first valuable Ace on the back line, because placing it in the middle gives you an opportunity to develop that row with only one more good card.

This advantage surpasses largely the benefits of having your Straight completed on the bottom line right from the start.

Be aware of the reasons why you make every single decision in OFC. Knowing your OFC openings – that’s how you will become a winning player!

Rendezvous next week for the continuation of these series of tips on Open Face Chinese Poker!

Meet me at the OFC tables on CoinPoker to practice your skills and enjoy the action. Open yourself a CoinPoker account today. Welcome to Fantasyland!

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Isabelle “No Mercy” Mercier

OFC “Progressive” World Champion