There’s a fun new game in town, known as Jackfruit Poker! Its a blend of Open Face Chinese Poker and Hold’em and it’s fast-paced, super fun points-based game to play with friends.

We don’t know much about its origin right now, but it seems to have been developed by the high stakes community in Macau, much like many of the other similar games, we take a look at the rules, give you the lowdown and share some basic strategy to get you started.

The Basics

Much like Chinese poker, two or more players are dealt cards face down, however, the twist here is that we see the Flop before we set our 3 different hands.

Each player is dealt 7 cards face down and you have to set 3, 2 card hands and discard one card of your choice. The idea of the game is to set hands with potential to win each hand and scoop against your opponent by beating each of their hands and get a huge 30 point bonus!

The top row has a 5x multiplier, the second row has a 3x multiplier and the points you get from the 3rd row are multiplied by 1x, so just the same score. Once everyone reveals their hands, we then deal the Turn and River and once the action is done, we count the points. You can use chips to keep score, or just write down the numbers.

Each hand has a different scoring value, here is what each different hand will score you in points

Some Tips

The way the points work in this game, we will want to have our strongest hands 1st, however, there are going to be times we have such a weak hand we will need to play strangely, it’s important to not get scooped in this game and lose 30 points.

To avoid this happening sometimes it’s worth playing defensively and setting a strong hand in the lower hands to prevent us losing every single hand.

Another Tip is that draws can be easily dominated due to each player getting dealt 7 cards, look to only play strong draws that won’t be crushed, because this can be costly, try out a set of rules like, you’ll only play flush draws of 9 or higher, this way you will dominate all lower draws and rarely be dominated yourself. Look to migrate this if you still find yourself in bad shape often.

Bart Hanson Plays Some Hands

Tom Dwan Playing JackFruit Poker

Tom shows us how to play a few hands against his friend here, with a few beers the pair get playing some pretty fun hands.

The lesson here is that everyone can play! With this being a mainly luck based variant of poker due to the limited options you have a player with very modest skill can best anyone in the short term.

This makes it super fun for anyone to play! Go watch Dwan be the proof of this as he loses to his friend in their game.