We have already discussed the history of Open Face Chinese Poker and how this game began just a few years ago before making it to the United States in 2012, but what about the game from which it derives, a game without which there would be no OFC Poker?

The history of Chinese Poker is not as clear as the history of many other games, but one thing that we do know is that Chinese Poker has a lot in common with Pai Gow, a game that has been around for nearly a thousand years. It is highly likely that Chinese Poker was created around the same time as Pai Gaw, and it remained in China, the country of its birth, for hundreds of years. Some have argued that during the nineteenth century, when many Chinese labourers made their way to the United States, they took Pai Gow with them and this game merged with standard games of poker (such as Draw and Stud) with which Chinese Poker emerged. Some argue that it was created several hundred years previous, offering high-stakes gamblers much more opportunity than Pai Gow did, but the truth is that no one knows for certain.

The game made it to the West in 1995, when it appeared in the World Series of Poker. The WSOP wasn’t as big back then as it is now, but it still attracted a lot of attention, with poker players all over the world signing up for the many events. In hindsight, Chinese Poker seems like an odd inclusion as it was yet to take off in the West, and perhaps this is why it was removed from the schedule just 2 years later. It had developed a small following by that time though and one of the many stories coming out of that time is of poker professional Barry Greenstein losing $1.5 million playing the game against Ted Forrest.

It was also reported to be popular with Phil Helmuth and other professionals such as Phil Ivey and Doyle Brunson. These are the players who had played in the big casinos and on the big tours in the East and so perhaps were more accustomed to the game because of that. The game was also played sporadically throughout Las Vegas at the time, hailed as a patient game that required a great deal of skill and strategy whilst offering the potential for big wins at the same time.

Chinese Poker has never really taken the world by storm, but it has proved to be very popular with high rollers who want some extra excitement. For many years it was popular in Finland and in Russia, and it was here where OFC was first developed, tweaking the rules and the layout of the game. OFC moved at a pace that Chinese Poker could only have dreamed of, and in just a few years it had enveloped much of the poker world.

It is clear that OFC is now way more popular than standard Chinese Poker, and that’s because it appeals to people from different walks of life, to people who are accustomed to Pai Gow, Draw, Stud and more. Whereas Chinese Poker offered gamblers something extra than Pai Gow, OFC poker gives even more, and you could also argue that Pineapple OFC is the next evolution of this game, although the differences between that and standard OFC are very minimal. It is worth remembering that without Chinese Poker then OFC wouldn’t have seen the light of day, so this game deserves as much respect as we give OFC, and if you have yet to play it, then our advice is to at least try it.

The poker world is embracing OFC Poker, and even die-hard Hold’em and Omaha fans are converting, with more and more turning to the game on a daily basis and making it the fastest growing poker variant in the history of the game. Despite this, it is still not available on the biggest and longest established poker sites. You can play it on mobile apps developed are smaller websites and companies, but the only big and trusted one to date is TonyBet, run by poker professional and general loud mouth Tony G.

That could be changing though, because the voices of OFC Poker fans are beginning to be heard. The online casinos are also taking cue from the land-based casinos who have noticed a significance surge in the popularity of this game over the last couple of years. If you go back to 2011, or even to early 2012, you wouldn’t find a single table playing OFC Poker game on the entire Las Vegas Strip, or even in the greater state of Nevada for that matter, but fast forward 12 months and this had changed drastically. In many casinos OFC is more prevalent than other poker variant, except for Hold’em. There are big money tournaments and regular cash games, and the number of these games available, along with the amount of people signing up for them, is on the up.

It was a matter of time before the online world decided that they wanted a piece of the action, and there is reason to believe that they are already planning to implement this game into their programs, working busily behind the scenes to jump on the OFC bandwagon as soon as they can. At the end of 2013, a petition opened on the Two Plus Two website — the biggest and most well-known poker site on the internet — to get Open-Face Chinese Poker onto Pokerstars, and rumour has it that Pokerstars agreed to implement the game into their software if enough people signed the petition. So how big would this be for the game? Put it this way, Hold’em wouldn’t be the game it is today without Pokerstars. It was helped by other websites as well, but those are no longer around and although the market share was split between Absolute Poker, Full Tilt and Pokerstars in the past, Absolute folded, Full Tilt were bought out by Pokerstars and Pokerstars itself is now the big daddy in the poker world.

If OFC poker moved to Pokerstars then it would be a matter of time before the biggest tournaments, currently aimed at Hold’em, also made the move. This game only made it to the United States in 2012, and just a year later it was taking over the biggest tours and tournaments. Where there used to be an occasional table and event for mixed games, Badugi and generally those games that few people play, there are now half a dozen tables and events for OFC, and soon it will stand side by side with Hold’em. OFC Poker has because brome the “other” game, a gap that was filled with everything from Stud to Draw, Badugi and 3-Card in the past.

TonyBet has already introduced the online world to OFC Poker, but as this is a relatively new site, people seem unwilling to make the switch. TonyBet is very reputable and very slick, but even those into OFC are still reluctant to make the move and instead are sticking with Hold’em and with Pokerstars, but as soon as the petition reaches a worthy number, and as soon as Pokerstars updates their software to allow for OFC tournaments and cash games, then the world domination of the game will be complete.

If you want to get on board and sign the petition then head on over to the 2+2 forum. You can also email Pokerstars directly at support@pokerstars.com, pleading with them. The more people that do this the sooner they will take action. In the meantime we would still advise that you check out TonyBet, as there are a lot of question marks about the legitimacy of other OFC Poker apps and games that use a real money system, whereas TonyBet is as clean, honest and as regulated as you would expect for a million dollar website.

TonyBet has fairly unique origins and a backstory that you don’t often get with other sports books and online casinos. The website was started by loud mouth and poker professional Tony G, but we’re not talking about something he just put his name and his likeness to, he actually started the site himself. Tony G began his career as a shrewd businessman and then moved into poker, and when his love of gambling began to take hold, and to boost his already weighty bank balance, he invested in sports and gambling.

Whereas many online poker sites are typically started in Caribbean islands, avoiding tax laws and sometimes even gambling laws, TonyBet began life in Lithuania, which is where Tony G was born. This, coupled with his aforementioned love of sports, is the reason that TonyBet sponsors the Lithuanian basketball team.

TonyBet is a solid site that uses top-of-the-range poker and gaming software and has been going steady since 2009, establishing itself as one of the biggest and best emerging sports books, casinos and poker rooms around. In fact, TonyBet has technically been around longer than that as it was initially known as OmniBet, which Tony G bought and rebranded.

TonyBet is licensed by the Estonian gaming authorities and the website is as secure as you can get. They take deposits through a range of methods, including credit and debit cards, and they have regular promotions and bonuses that new players and existing players can take advantage of.

Sports Book and Casino

One of the main advantages of TonyBet is that it’s more than just a poker room or a casino and also has an extensive sports betting feature that allows you to bet on everything from American Football to European Basketball. Players are given a deposit bonus to help them on their way and they can use any winnings to fund their poker or casino accounts.

The software for the sports book itself is very slick and easy to navigate, much like the popular SkyBet website and leagues above slow and tedious sites such as Ladbrokes and Betway. There is also a live betting feature, where players can bet on the games as they play out, gambling on next scores, total points and much more.

If you want something a little different, then there is a fun little game called Bet on Poker. This is not quite as good as the real thing, but it is certainly interesting. Here players are faced with a live dealer who deals cards into several spaces on the table in front of her, creating “hands” that the players can then gamble on. They can bet before and during the hands and the bets revolve around the quality of the hands, so for short odds they can bet that a pair or two pairs will be shown, whilst for bigger odds they can take a punt that a flush, straight or full house will be shown. The dealers tend to be young and very attractive women, and there is also a screen behind them showing the latest live sporting fixtures. There are also similar live versions of lottery and dice games available on the site, complete with more eye candy.

The casino itself has a number of classic table games available, and there are also a great number of slot machines, from standard slots to bonus slots, video poker and more. There is even a section devoted to virtual scratch cards, where players can simulate the joy of scratching a card to reveal a huge jackpot.

The Piece De Resistance

Although it pretty much ticks all of the boxes, the main selling point of TonyBet, and the one thing that sets it apart from every other website of its type, is the fact that you can play OFC Poker. In fact, this is currently the biggest gambling website that facilitates the game of OFC Poker, and has done a great job of paving the way for many others to follow.

The tournaments are not always full, but there are smaller cash games that usually are and there are also big guaranteed tournaments that are advertised well in advance and tend to draw a considerable crowd. The software itself is even better than many of the OFC Poker apps out there, and the fact that you can play for real money completely blows them out of the water.

Overall

There is very little wrong with TonyBet. We’re a little biased because as much as we love OFC Poker, the idea of playing it when there is no money involved is a title tedious, so TonyBet came to our aid there. This is the biggest and best source of real money Open-Face Chinese Poker anywhere on the internet, and it does not disappoint. The sports book and the casino is also great, and there are some unique and exclusive live games that add something a little different and a little extra to your gambling experience.

TonyBet is a gambling experience, with everything you could need under one roof, and although we do admit to being biased due to them catering for our adoration of OFC Poker, we are not lying when we say that this is also one of the best sports books and casinos that we have played in.

With such a new game, and one that has yet to break into the mainstream, it can be hard to find a community of people that loves the game as much as you do and devotes as much of their time to learning and perfecting it as you do. These communities are cropping up all of the time though and big poker boards are also expanding into OFC, embracing this new and exciting game with open arms.

One of the best communities out there at the moment is Flop Turn River. This site covers most forms of poker in general, but has a dedicated section for Open Faced Chinese Poker where fans of the game can discuss strategies, tournaments and more. In general, the poker forum on Flop Turn River has over 1.1 million posts and the OFC section is growing all of the time. They also have their own competitions.

So head on over and check it out, make sure you get in early because OFC is sure to take off and this community is already becoming the home for the game and its players.

For those who are familiar with the world of professional poker, Tony G will be a common name, and maybe even a common sight, but for those who are new to this wonderful game, and to OFC, he might not be that well known. Tony G is the owner of the TonyBet site, which is based in Lithuania and is proud to call itself the first OFC-dedicated poker site in the world, but this spirited and controversial character is also so much more than that.

Born Antanas Guoga, in Kaunas, Lithuania, Tony began played poker aged 18, by which time he had moved to Australia. Known as “The Mouth from Down Under”, Tony began to make a name for himself at the turn of the century when his talents at poker saw him run deep in many big events. At the 2004 World Series of Poker, Tony cashed in both Pot Limit Texas Hold’em and Seven Card Stud events, establishing himself as a versatile player, but also one that couldn’t keep his mouth shut. 

Although not perceived to be as “bitter” or as “childish” as “The Poker Brat” Phil Helmuth, Tony’s mouth was just as active at the tables, and made him even more famous than his consistent play and his high-stake victories. During a particularly vocal event in 2006, one commentator declared that Tony G could, “single-handedly reignite the Cold War,” which was a sentiment that many of his opponents echoed. And his speeches were not just for those that had the nerve to beat him either, he also liked the needle the silent players, those that he beat and basically anyone who dared to sit at a table and play with him.

His celebrity helped him to appearance on televised events, such as The Big Game and Poker After Dark, both of which were high-stakes cash games, an area in which Tony excelled. As a top notch player, and successful businessman, Tony always had the bankroll behind him to fund these big tournament entries, and even though he continued to win more big tournaments, exceeding total tournament earnings of $4 million by 2011, Tony continued to flourish in the business world. In 2011 he established the Lithuanian Poker Federation and, much more recently, the TonyBet poker and sports book website. 

Tony is favorite with players and fans all over. Those who know him have learned to treat him as harmless and to acknowledge his banter as nothing more than amusing and curious, but those who sit at a table with him for the first time tend to feel intimidated, and they have every right to do so. Tony understands the game of poker better than most and the fact that he is able to play and win most variants also shows that he is just as flexible as he is consistent.

Tony has since announced his retirement from professional poker, which will please a lot of player and displease a lot of fans, but he continues to be an advocate for the game. TonyBet is his new baby, and if you’re lucky then you might bump into him at one of the OFC tables and be on the receiving end of some of his world famous trash talk.

As a big fan of the game of OFC I firmly believe that in as little as a couple of years OFC will be the second most popular poker variant in the world. There are a number of hurdles for it to overcome in order to get there of course, and those will be discussed in this article.

The first issue concerns online play and goes some way to explaining why OFC isn’t already more popular online. If Badugi can have a spot on Pokerstars, then why can’t OFC? The answer is actually pretty simply and it all has to do with the software. It is relatively easy for poker sites such as Pokerstars and Full Tilt Poker to adapt their program to include many of the new variants, and indeed on Pokertars you can play everything from 2-7 Draw, 5-Card Draw and Badugi, to Omaha, Courcheval and more. But those variants have one or more things in common. They are played with a minimum of 2 player-cards and a maximum of 7, and bets are placed, raised and then exchanged. Chinese Poker is very different. Each player needs to set up his hand in front of him and also needs to be able to see the hands of others, and there is also the point system which works differently from he standard betting rules of common poker variants. This all serves to make the task of incorporating these games into the current software very difficult, if not impossible, and the big poker sites would need to spend some time and money coming up with some new software that could make this work.

As fast as OFC is growing, it still isn’t quite at the stage were it can rival Hold’em or Omaha and therefore the big sites are unlikely to make a move towards doing this anytime soon. This leave the option of other sites, such as TonyBet, which have built their software around OFC. TonyBet is very much the litmus test for the industry. If it works of them, and if they get the revenue and the players, then there’s a good chance that the big sites will make the necessary investments to try and muscle-in on those players. That’s the way the industry works and as cruel and as unfair as it will be for TonyBet and other such sites, it will be great for OFC players. That’s not to say that TonyBet can’t hold onto their players, as someone who has played on most poker sites out there I can attest to the fact that their software is one of the easiest to use and their overall service is second to none. So they will fight to retain that market and in many ways they might succeed.

But what about live play? Will we ever see an explosion in OFC like we did for Hold’em? This is hard to judge. Standard Chinese Poker has been played professionally since 1995 when it saw its first appearance at the World Series of Poker. It was also played sporadically in Las Vegas casinos in the prevailing years. Nearly two decades later this game has not taken off, and if anything its popularity has reduced, but OFC is different.

OFC’s popularity has already surpassed that of standard Chinese Poker and it is still played in casinos through the US. This game is massive in Finland and Russia where it is the preferred game for many poker professionals, and it is also becoming just as popular in the US and Europe. In the last two years alone OFC has gone from a game that no one had ever heard of, to one of the hottest trends in the poker world, and in another two years, if the growth continues at this rate, we’ll surely see OFC overtake Badugi, Omaha, Draw and Stud variants and close in on the might that is Texas Hold’em.

This is where my prediction comes in. I believe that in two years time the popularity of OFC will explode. The poker pros will be the first to embrace this game, and once they push it on TV and on social media then their fans and the rest of the poker world will follow. TonyBet and other such sites will take onboard the rush of players looking for an online game of OFC and then Pokerstars, Full Tilt and all of the other big players will also jump on the bandwagon. Before 2020 I firmly believe that there will be a large cash event for OFC at the WSOP, and that it will also have a regular place on the EPT and WPT.

OFC is not going to surpass Texas Hold’em, it might become more popular and it might be that the majority of players prefer it, but as someone who regularly played both of these games, and knows a lot of people who do the same, I am confident that they will be played side by side; Hold’em and OFC will be brothers in a way that Hold’em and Omaha could have been but never quite were.

As Open-Face Chinese Poker continues to grow in popularity, attracting players from all over the world, the rules of the game are being tweaked and exploited. Changing the rules of Hold’em would seem blasphemous to a long-time player of that game, and the same applies to many other variants, but the relative newness of OFC, and the fact that the game itself was spawned when someone twisted the rules of standard Chinese Poker, has left it open to interpretation.

One of the most exciting changes comes in the form of Pineapple Open-Face Chinese Poker, a game that is played and adored by Shaun Deeb and friends, who were some of the first US poker pros to adopt OFC. Pineapple speeds up the game somewhat and adds an extra element of excitement, the fact that it also increases the chances of scoring royalties (the points which lead to payment) and getting into Fantasy Land (the goal of many OFC players) means that it also drastically increases risk and reward.

Pineapple can only be played with two or three players as the deck will not accommodate game sizes any larger than this. As in normal OFC, players each get 5 cards to begin with and they have to build three hands from those cards. It is after this round that things change, instead of the 1 card in OFC, in Pineapple players get three cards, of which they must use two (with the other being discarded face down). The rounds continue in this fashion until all 13 cards are dealt, and the winning hands are determined in the same way as in standard OFC.

Fantasy Land, although much easier to obtain in this version, is just as worthwhile. In Fantasy Land you are dealt five cards to begin with, and are then dealt 9 cards on the following hand, with one of these cards begin discarded. Due to the nature of the game it is not unknown for more than one player to enter Fantasy Land at the same time.

Many players prefer this version of the game and it is certainly more popular with No-limit Hold’em players who are used to seeing fortunes won and lost in single hands. I would advise against any newcomers playing this variant, simply due to the fact that it is much easier to lose it all than it is in standard OFC, but once you are familiar with OFC then Pineapple is certainly worth trying out.

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Tournament play is the backbone of poker. It is what attracts the vast majority of the players, from micro stakes to high-stakes. It may take you several hours, but in tournament poker you can win 100x, 1000x or even more of your buy-in, and if that buy-in is for a tournament like the World Series of Poker Main Event, then we’re talking about a life changing amount of money. It is no surprise then that tournament games for Hold’em, Omaha and indeed most other poker variants always attract more players than the cash games, but what about OFC?

For those of you who are not familiar with the game, Open-Face Chinese Poker works on a point based system, where you score points against other opponents. If you are playing with several other people at the table and they are all involved in one hand, then you could score 1 point against one player and 6 against another, even though it is the same hand. This can make OFC tournaments complicated and is why I have had a number of emails asking me how these tournaments operate.

To begin with, there is not much different to a standard poker tournament. All players start with an equal number of chips and the tables are usually fully occupied — that is to say that unless specified, it’s not heads-up play throughout. There are set blind levels and these typically change every eight hands or so. Points are converted into chips, usually at a rate of 1 point per 1.000 chips. So, if I score 6 points against you, then you give me 6.000 chips, and if I score 3 points against another opponent, they give me 3.000 and I have 9.000 in total from that hand. Of course, this complicates matters if one person only has 1.000 chips and needs to both pay several chips and receive several chips, in this instance we follow the pattern of the play from the dealer onwards. So, let’s assume that I have 1.000 chips and need to pay 3.000 and receive 6.000. The person I am receiving has the dealer chip but he only has 2.000 in his stack. He gives me his 2.000 chips and is then eliminated, and as I would then only have 3.000 chips, I would pay them to the person who outscored me and I would also be eliminated.

You can think of it like a game of H/L games. You might be able to win the high pot, but if that is a split pot and you then go on to lose the low pot, you end up a lot worse than when you began the hand.

This pattern follows through to the end of the tournament and although it may seem strange at first, it is very easy and almost natural once you get into the swing of it. My advice to any poker player who has plenty of experience in standard poker tournaments is just to get a brief of the rules and structure and then jump in. There is no better way to learn the game than to play it, and providing you understand the game itself then the rest should be simple.

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