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Goal

A solitaire. Bank 10 five-card poker hands from one deck. Three bots play the same deck, and your hands are compared with each bot’s, strongest against strongest down to weakest against weakest. Beating the Expert bot wins the game.

This is the Classic game. The Oregon variant is set out under Variants.

Cards

Use a standard 52-card deck and 2 Jokers, 54 cards in all. What a Joker can do is set out under Hand rankings.

Play

1. Deal 10 cards face up. They’re your pool.
2. Bank a hand. Choose any 5 cards from your pool and set them aside as a banked hand. The other 5 stay in your pool.
3. Deal 5 more onto your pool, so you again choose from 10, and bank another hand.
4. The last round. After 9 hands only 4 cards are left. Deal them onto your pool and bank your 10th hand from those 9. The last 4 cards aren’t used.

Three bots, the Beginner, the Skilled, and the Expert, play the same deck in the same order, and each banks 10 hands of its own.

Scoring

Put your 10 hands in order from strongest to weakest, and do the same with each bot’s. Compare your strongest hand with the bot’s strongest, your second with its second, and so on down to your 10th.

• A stronger hand scores you 1 point.
• Equal hands score you half a point.

That gives you a score out of 10 against each bot, and more than 5 beats that bot. Beating the Expert wins the game, and exactly 5 against the Expert is a draw.

Variants

Oregon uses the same 54 cards. You build rows of 5 cards, and each row scores as a poker hand.

1. The first row. Turn the top 5 cards of the deck face up as your first row.
2. Use the next card. Turn over the next card of the deck. You can’t refuse it, so you must do one of these:
   • Cover any card of your current row with it. The covered card is out of the game.
   • Open a new row with it, and add the next 4 cards of the deck to make the row up to 5.
3. Only the current row can be covered. Opening a new row settles the row before it for good.
4. The last row. With fewer than 5 cards left you can still open a new row. It takes every card that’s left, and the game ends.
5. The game ends when the deck runs out.

Each full row scores by its hand, and your score is the total of your rows.

• Straight flush, a royal flush included: 10 points
• Four of a kind: 7 points
• Full house: 5 points
• Flush, straight, or three of a kind: 3 points
• Two pair: 2 points
• Pair: 1 point
• Anything else: 0 points

A last row of fewer than 5 cards scores only for matching ranks, as four of a kind, three of a kind, two pair, or a pair. It never counts as a straight or a flush. A Joker counts as zero there, so two Jokers are a pair.

The same three bots play the same deck, and the totals are compared. Scoring more than the Expert wins the game, and scoring the same is a draw.

This variant is based on Oregon, a solitaire by Reiner Knizia (1995).

Hand rankings

Hands rank from strongest, at the top, to weakest.