Pay Attention to your Opponent

Just like in blackjack, Open-Face Chinese Poker involves paying as much attention to your opponent’s cards as your own. In Open-Face Chinese Poker your own cards are just a little more important than those held by your opponent, but don’t ignore them. You need to watch how their hands develop so that you know which hands you can sacrifice and which hands you need to make stronger. Open-Face Chinese Poker is all about building three winning hands, weakening one hand in order to strengthen another and so on. There is a very fine line between success and defeat, but if you pay close attention to what your opponent is doing, then you can straddle that line safely.

Start Small

You might think that there isn’t a lot of risk involved with Open-Face Chinese Poker and therefore you might increase your stake. After all, it’s a points based system and you’ll probably get enough points of your own to make sure that you don’t lose too much money, right? Not really. It is not uncommon for things to go very bad for you, as they can do in any variant of poker, and if you have set the value for 1 point very high, then you will lose a lot of money when things do turn ugly.

Make your first few games and your first few tournaments your practice games. Bet low and see the games more as a way to learn strategies and to gain experience than a way to win money. Once you get good and once you begin to make some cash, you can increase the amount you are playing for. When you have played the game for a good length of time and are confident with it, then you can play for an amount that will really make things interesting.

Don’t Ignore the Front Hand

Many players tend to ignore the front hand, stick a few high cards there and not paying any attention to it at all. This is a huge mistake, but you can also use the fact that other players will ignore it to your advantage, securing a win by putting a decent hand up there. Obviously you can’t just stick a super strong hand up there, because if you don’t have stronger hands below then you will foul and you will lose everything. Make sure you have created strong hands elsewhere and then focus your attention on the front hand and on something that is better than a simple high card. Most of the time this will guarantee you a win and if your luck is in then you could get a clean sweep and the bonus points that go along with it.