NoMercy OFC Crash Course: Opening With Straights (Part 3)

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 and Straight Draws. 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

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

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

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

Possibility Number 3: Ace-high Straights With so many Fantasyland cards in this initial draw, don’t even think of wasting these 3 major assets for anything else. Not for a Flush, as we saw in the chapter on that subject

and certainly not for a Straight.

You should play this as an opening with 5 different cards with 2 or more Fantasyland cards. We will study this type of opening in a later chapter and as a general rule, you should focus on this Fantasyland possibility. In order to do so, you have to dismiss the made Straight and play these cards as if they were not connected.

The best play here will be J-10 in the back, Ace in the middle and King-Queen on top.

Remember that chapter next time you are dealt such a Straight to open your OFC hand. It may be difficult to sacrifice this made bottom, especially when you are running bad, but it is for sure the correct play.

Possibility Number 4: Queen-high Straights

In a case like this that involves a Fantasyland card, and always keeping in mind that these advices are based on a Heads Up play where you are first to act, you should split your made hand and place 8-9-10-J in the back along with your Queen on top. The idea here is similar to what we saw in the A-5 Straight:

This play leaves you with 89% chances of hitting one of 7 remaining outs before the end of the hand with still 12 cards to come.

Overall, remember that the idea of this game is to place Aces in the middle and Queens on top.

As such, you will hope to draw a 7 to complete that Straight, so you can put your second Queen on top, where it belongs. Again here, and accordingly to what you now see on the boards, you might place your second Queen on top if all 7s are live and if your middle row is already fulfilled or will most likely be fulfilled.

Be aware of the reasons why you make every single decision in OFC. 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