Ring Poker

Goal

Take cards in pairs from a ring of 6, then build three 5-card poker hands from them. Each of your hands is compared with the matching hand of every other player, and the player with the most points wins.

Cards

Use a standard 52-card deck plus 2 Jokers, 54 cards in all.

Setup

Deal the whole deck face down into 6 piles of 9 cards and set the piles out in a circle. Each pile marks one position in the ring.

Play

1. Play 9 rounds. At the start of each round, turn the top card of every pile face up in front of it, so the ring holds 6 face-up cards.
2. Take two adjacent cards. Two cards are adjacent when their positions are next to each other in the circle, all the way around. A position whose card has been taken is a gap, and the cards on either side of a gap aren’t adjacent.
3. Two players take a pair each round. The round’s first player takes a pair, then the player to their left takes a pair from the 4 cards left.
4. The round ends with 2 cards left. With 2 players, discard them. With 3 players, the player who took no pair this round takes them.
5. The first player moves one seat to the left for the next round.
6. Build three hands. After 9 rounds every player holds 18 cards. Build three poker hands of exactly 5 cards each in secret, then everybody shows their hands at once. The other 3 cards are spares and count for nothing.

Scoring

Hands are compared slot by slot: every player’s strongest hand against the others’ strongest, then the middle hands, then the weakest.

• With 2 players, the stronger hand in each slot scores 1 point.
• With 3 players, the strongest hand in each slot scores 2 points and the second strongest scores 1.
• Tied hands each score the points for the place they share, and use up the places they fill. With 3 players, two hands tied for strongest score 2 each and the third scores 0.

The player with the most points wins. If players tie on points, the one whose weakest hand is stronger wins. If those hands are equal too, the tied players share the win.

Hand rankings

Examples

• 6 adjacent pairs At the start of a round the ring holds 6 cards. Each is adjacent to the card on either side of it, all the way around, so the 7♥ is adjacent to the Q♦ and the 7♣.

• 3 pairs left Once the 7♥ and the 7♣ are taken, their positions are a gap. The Q♦ and the K♠ on either side of it aren’t adjacent, so 3 pairs are left.

• 2 cards left You take the 7♥ and the 7♣ first. Your opponent on your left takes 2 of the 4 cards still in the ring: the 5♠ and the 9♠, which are adjacent. That leaves the Q♦ and the K♠, and the round ends.

  You Opponent

Open the rules page