Chinese Poker

13-card poker — arrange your cards into three hands (3 top, 5 middle, 5 bottom) and beat opponents hand-by-hand.

🌤indoor

What is Chinese Poker?

Chinese Poker is a poker variant played with a standard 52-card deck dealt entirely to 2–4 players (13 cards each). Each player arranges their cards into three poker hands — a 3-card top hand, and 5-card middle and bottom hands — with the constraint that middle beats or equals top, and bottom beats or equals middle. Players score by beating each opponent hand-by-hand. Open-face variants where cards are placed sequentially are hugely popular online.

Quick facts

Category

Card Games

Type

Individual

Players

2–4

Where played

indoor

Country of origin

🇨🇳 China

Estimated origin

20th-century China; open-face variant boomed 2010s

Olympic

No

Popularity

regional

Sources & provenance

Last verified 2026-08-24.verified