2026-09-01 · English · OFC Oracle

Full-Hand OFC Solver — Every Street, Not Just Fantasyland

A full-hand OFC solver evaluates every street of Open Face Chinese Poker — the opening 5-card deal through the final draw — not just Fantasyland placement. Public solvers today only cover Fantasyland. OFC Oracle offers free, exact Fantasyland (13–17 cards, joker-aware) and endgame solvers now, with a full-street advisor in beta.

What "full-hand" means in Open Face Chinese Poker

Pineapple Open Face Chinese Poker (OFC) is played over five deals: an opening 5-card hand, followed by four rounds where you draw 3 cards, place 2, and discard 1. Every card goes into one of three rows — top (3 cards), middle (5 cards), bottom (5 cards) — and the final hand must satisfy bottom ≥ middle ≥ top in strength or it fouls.

A "Fantasyland solver" only answers one narrow question: given a static 13–17 card hand (the Fantasyland deal), what is the best top/middle/bottom split? A full-hand OFC solver answers a much bigger question: at every decision point across all five deals, which cards should go where, and which card should be discarded, to maximize expected royalties and win rate?

That difference — one static hand vs. a five-stage sequential decision problem — is why full-hand solving is a different order of problem.

Why existing public OFC solvers stop at Fantasyland

As of this writing, the public Fantasyland-only tools available cover only that single hand. One paid trainer that covers more decision points goes further with a Training/Editor product, but a free, exact, full-street solver is not something we've found publicly available. (See our OFC solver comparison for details on each.)

Fantasyland-only tools are common because Fantasyland is computationally tractable: it's a single combinatorial optimization over a fixed card set. Solving the earlier streets exactly is a different scale of problem entirely — explained below.

Why solving every street exactly is hard

The core obstacle is combinatorial explosion combined with hidden information (the opponent's hand and the undealt cards).

• Starting from the opening 5-card deal, the full remaining game tree — every legal sequence of draws, placements, and discards to the end of the hand — is on the order of 10²² nodes. Brute-force enumeration from street 1 is not feasible on any hardware available today.
• The exact horizon — the point from which full enumeration is still practical — is the last two streets of the hand, where the remaining tree shrinks to roughly 10⁸–10⁹ nodes. OFC Oracle's endgame solver already computes this exactly, in well under a second.
• Every street before that has to be handled differently, because exact search is off the table.

Our approach: exact where it's tractable, learned where it must be

Rather than trying to brute-force the whole tree or trust a black-box neural network end to end, OFC Oracle's approach is layered:

1. Exact endgame. The last two streets are solved by full expectimax search — no approximation, because the search space is small enough to enumerate.
2. Exact Fantasyland. The 13–17 card Fantasyland hand is solved by exact enumeration over all legal top/middle/bottom splits, including joker hands.
3. Backward-bootstrapped mid-game. Value estimates for earlier streets are trained using the exact endgame as ground truth, then propagated backward street by street — rather than training from raw self-play, which has no anchor to exact values.
4. Precomputed opening book. The opening 5-card deal has only 134,459 distinct hands once suit and rank symmetry are collapsed, small enough that OFC Oracle can precompute guidance for every one of them offline.

This mirrors the general shape of how strong solvers have been built in other imperfect-information games with a computable endgame: anchor to exact values near the end of the hand, and bootstrap backward rather than learning the whole game from scratch with no ground truth.

What's available today vs. what's in beta

• Free and exact today: Fantasyland solver (13–17 cards, joker-aware) and endgame solver (exact EV ranking of every legal placement on the final draw).
• In beta: a full-street advisor that extends guidance to earlier streets using the trained value model described above. Because it is not yet an exact solver for streets 2–3, treat its suggestions as strong guidance for study, not as a claim of optimal play.

OFC Oracle is built for off-table study and training — reviewing hands, building intuition about row allocation, and checking Fantasyland and endgame decisions exactly. It is not designed or intended for real-time use during a hand in progress.

References

• OFC Oracle — Fantasyland solver, endgame solver, full-street advisor (beta)
• OFC solver comparison (2026) — how public OFC solvers differ in scope

Try the free, exact Fantasyland solver and endgame solver on OFC Oracle, or follow along as the full-street advisor comes out of beta.