Chinese Poker Rules & Scoring Explained

Chinese poker is a card-setting game with no betting and no bluffing. You are dealt 13 cards and split them into three separate poker hands — a five-card back, a five-card middle, and a three-card front — and then every player’s rows are compared head-to-head and scored point by point. That is the whole game: three arrangement decisions, made once, using the standard poker hand rankings to value each row.

Because there are no rounds of betting and no cards to draw, the skill lives entirely in how you divide your 13 cards. That makes it a popular side game among tournament pros killing time, and an easy one to learn if you already know what beats what. If you don’t, the beginner’s guide to poker hands is the right starting point.

The three hands

Every player builds three hands, stacked from bottom to top:

Row	Cards	Role
Back (bottom)	5	Your strongest hand
Middle	5	Between back and front
Front (top)	3	Your weakest hand

The five-card rows can be anything on the ranking chart — a pair, a straight, a full house, quads. The three-card front is limited: with only three cards it can hold a high card, a pair, or at most three of a kind. No three-card straights or flushes count.

The rule that governs everything

Your rows must descend in strength from bottom to top: back ≥ middle ≥ front. The back must beat or tie the middle, and the middle must beat or tie the front. Set your hands out of that order and you foul — you forfeit all three rows at once and typically pay each opponent as though they scooped you.

This single constraint is what makes the game hard. A monster five-card combination is worthless, or worse, if it lands in the wrong row. Consider a hand where you can make three of a kind and, separately, two pair:

• Put the trips in the back and the two pair in the middle — legal, because trips outrank two pair.
• Put the two pair in the back and the trips in the middle — a foul, because the middle now beats the back.

Same ten cards, two arrangements, one of them scores zero. Before you lock anything in, read your hand back to front and confirm the descent holds.

How scoring works: the 1-6 method

Once everyone has set, hands are revealed and compared. The most common method is 1-6 scoring:

• Compare each of your three rows against the same row of each opponent, one opponent at a time.
• Win a row = +1; lose a row = −1 against that player. A tie scores nothing.
• Win all three rows against one opponent = a scoop, worth a bonus. In the 1-6 system a scoop pays 6 units instead of the 3 you’d get for winning three rows individually.

So against a single opponent your result on a hand ranges from −6 (scooped) to +6 (you scooped them). In a four-handed game you settle three of these one-on-one comparisons every deal, which is why swings add up quickly over a session.

Some groups play a 2-4 variant that pays 2 for a normal row win and 4 for a scoop; the arithmetic differs but the principle is identical.

Royalties (bonus points)

Premium hands earn royalties — flat bonuses paid on top of the row scoring, regardless of whether you win the comparison. Exact schedules are house rules, but a representative table looks like this:

Hand	Where	Typical bonus
Three of a kind	Front	+3
Full house	Middle	+2
Four of a kind	Middle / Back	+8 / +4
Straight flush	Middle / Back	+10 / +5
Royal flush	Back	+25

The pattern to notice: the same hand is worth more in the middle than the back, because it is harder to keep your rows legal when you promote a big hand up a row. Trips in the front is prized precisely because three-of-a-kind is the ceiling for that row.

A few tables also pay naturals — being dealt 13 cards that form an instant special hand, like a dragon (one card of every rank) or three flushes — which usually wins the maximum from everyone no matter how they set.

Fouling, and how to not do it

Fouling is the beginner’s nemesis and it comes from a predictable place: loading the back with your five best cards and then discovering the leftovers make an illegal middle or front. The habit that prevents it:

1. Find your best five-card hand and pencil it into the back.
2. Build the middle from what remains.
3. Check that the middle still beats whatever the front becomes.
4. If the front accidentally out-ranks the middle, rebalance before you commit.

That last step is where fouls actually happen — a stray pair drifting into the front that outranks a weak middle. Confirm the full descent one more time before you reveal.

Chinese poker is arrangement and arithmetic, nothing more — no bluffing, no position, no draws. When you want the version that deals cards one at a time and forces live foul-avoidance decisions on every card, learn open-face Chinese poker. For the broader family of setting and shedding games, the poker variants hub is the place to browse.