Rules & strategy

The printed source

The supplied Washington State Gambling Commission Thirteen Card Poker game rules is the source for deck, row scoring and listed payment options. It is not a claim that this app is regulated or approved. The PDF is supplied unchanged; full source text is also available.

PDF SHA256: 9e7b3f4c899ebb61d58ff47d36ad71f9569396313c7a00011be7f43086cd85a0

Each seat receives 13 cards from a freshly shuffled 52-card deck, without jokers. Arrange front (3), middle (5), back (5). Back must rank strictly higher than middle, and middle strictly higher than front. Front straights and flushes do not count.

Poker order: straight flush (royal highest), four of a kind, full house, flush, straight, trips, two pair, pair, high card. Default pairwise scoring: +1 for each winning row, −1 for each losing row, 0 for a tie. A sweep totals 3, without another sweep payment. Every seat compares against every other seat.

The printed example totals +3, +1, +3, −7 for Players 1–4; optional bonuses are excluded from that example.

Optional printed scales: 2–4 pays 2 for two wins and 4 for a sweep. 1–6 pays 1 for two wins and 6 for a sweep. The application’s tied-row extension is specified separately below.

The source names three straights, three flushes, six pairs and Dragon (all thirteen ranks) as naturals, with a typical payment of 3 units. It permits surrender at a specified amount without printing that amount. It does not specify the following precedence and foul rules.

Documented house clarifications

These software rules complete cases the printed source leaves open. They are shown separately from printed rules. Table settings and the house-way version freeze before dealing. All humans must consent to each deal; changing next-hand settings resets those consents.

1. Ranking and ties: suits do not break ties. Compare category, then usual kickers; missing front kickers are padded with zero when comparing front against middle. Equal rank fails strict row ordering. Ace is high except A2345, or A23 for a natural’s three-card straight. No wraparound.
2. Bonuses: enabled by default, additive across qualifying rows, earned by a legal ordinary hand whether its row wins or ties. Reciprocal bonuses offset. Royal flush is a straight flush, with no extra award. No double-counting a row’s lower categories.
3. Naturals: require an explicit claim. Three straights/flushes need disjoint 5/5/3 witnesses; natural witnesses need not obey ordinary row ordering. Three-card natural straights include A23 and QKA, never KA2. A quad counts as two of six disjoint pairs, with one extra card. Dragon has each rank once. A player may decline a natural and set ordinary rows.
4. Natural precedence: a natural replaces row comparisons and all bonuses for a 3-unit payment, even against a foul. Two naturals offset at zero, with no ranking. Multiple patterns bring no extra payment. Display-label preference is Dragon, six pairs, three flushes, three straights, solely for a consistent label.
5. Surrender: after confirmation, pay 3 units to every remaining non-surrendering opponent. Submission order cannot affect that set. Two surrenders offset. Surrender overrides all other comparison, including naturals and fouls. A live foul receives payment from a surrender. All surrendering means zero transfer.
6. Foul: a complete but incorrectly ordered 3/5/5 arrangement requires explicit confirmation. It loses a fixed 3-unit base under every scale and earns no royalties; a legal ordinary opponent also receives its own bonuses. Two fouls offset completely. Natural and surrender rules take precedence. Duplicate, missing and foreign cards are errors, never accepted fouls.
7. Alternative scales with ties: any positive row majority short of a sweep pays the non-sweep amount (2 under 2–4, 1 under 1–6). This includes two wins/one tie and one win/two ties. Equal wins and losses pay zero. A sweep pays 4 or 6. Reverse the sign for a losing majority. Bonuses remain additive.
8. Payment order: surrender → natural → foul → ordinary rows and reciprocal bonuses. Compare every pair once and record equal opposite transfers. All balances remain nonnegative integers.

Before each deal every seat must reserve 16 units per opponent (a conservative maximum base 6 plus bonuses 10). No credit, partial payouts or bot refills. The host may reduce units between hands if funds are insufficient. Starting balances are 1 000; rules allow integer unit values 1–100 subject to this reserve.

Setting and house-way

Select a card, then its destination row, using pointer or keyboard, or drag it. Move a card to the tray to make room. Locking is final; all hands remain private until all players lock. Natural and surrender claims also lock. Disconnection never auto-surrenders. The next hand requires every human’s consent. House seats follow the same fixed policy as the House-way button.

House-way is a deterministic legal heuristic, not proven optimal play. It first claims an eligible natural. Otherwise it examines all 72,072 labeled 3/5/5 partitions and chooses a legal arrangement maximizing the sum of row-strength encodings. Each encoding is category × 15⁵ plus five base-15 kicker digits, zero padded. Category values are high card 0 through straight flush 8. Ties prefer greater front, then middle, then back strength, then the lexicographically smallest card-ID arrangement. IDs are 2..A within clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades. Its version is cp-house-1.

You can edit suggested cards before locking. There is no editable algorithm or weights. Claiming a natural uses its canonical witness instead of ordinary rows. A manual setting may value the front or a bonus differently; the house-way does not optimize against opponents’ likely holdings.

Skill and luck

Skill = your actual net − what your frozen house-way would have scored against those same actual revealed opponent actions. The unit, scoring rules and precedence are identical. Following house-way gives exactly zero skill, including equivalent row order and natural claims. Actual opponents’ departures remain fixed in this counterfactual.

Luck = your house-way net against every opponent’s house-way on the actual dealt cards − the unconditional expectation, zero. Symmetry makes the expectation zero for equally treated seats under a shuffled, zero-sum game with identical stakes and reserves, including reciprocal bonuses and natural offsets. This is an unconditional model, not conditional sampling. Luck excludes everyone’s setting departures. Skill and luck are separate diagnostics and need not add to actual net.

The reveal shows both counterfactual nets. Session totals use exact integer chips; averages divide by completed hands. These figures describe this heuristic and these hands, not universal ability or a prediction of future results.

Private rooms and recovery

Private multiplayer supports 2–4 humans. Solo supports you against 1–3 house-way seats. All seats must join before the first deal. There are no spectators or replacements. End the room between hands to stop; abandoning a browser during a hand leaves it waiting for reconnect.

The invitation contains only a private joining code, never a seat credential. Anyone with it can take an open seat. Your browser saves a separate random reconnect credential in IndexedDB before requesting a seat. Keep access to that browser. The share code and host cannot recover a lost credential; clearing storage or forgetting the seat loses access. Same-origin scripts and anyone with access to your browser may access that saved credential. No third-party scripts or analytics are used.

Seven days without an accepted gameplay action or authenticated reconnect deletes the room, hands, credentials and ledger. Reading and duplicate retries do not extend expiry. No unsettled payments are charged when a room expires. A room supports at most 3 000 hands and 20 000 recorded operations; the interface reserves the final 50 operation slots for finishing an active hand and ending the room, instead of evicting payment-retry records. Only the most recent 20 hands are shown, while settlement receipts persist until expiry.

Malformed requests have no effects. Duplicate retries cannot pay twice. The server rejects corrupted card assignments; a server error preserves the last committed state and does not charge a foul. A deployment or rule change never silently reinterprets a settled hand.