NN777 How to Play Pusoy — Setting 13 Cards Into Three Hands

How to play pusoy starts with 13 cards that you arrange into three hands: a front of 3 cards, a middle of 5 and a back of 5. Winning comes from setting every card where it earns the most without breaking the order. This page walks you through the set-up, the order of the hands and the scoring.

It sits on the rest of the table games list as the one game where you arrange cards instead of betting on them. The game is a cousin of poker, so the hand names are the ones you already know. The new skill is balance, because one strong hand is worth nothing if it leaves the other two too weak to stay in order.

How to play pusoy in six steps

Follow these in order the first few times. Each step can be done with a real deck on a kitchen table.

1. Take your 13 cards from a 52-card deck and sort them by rank.
2. Find the strongest five-card hand you can make. This is your back hand.
3. From the cards that remain, make the best five-card hand you can without outranking the back. This is your middle hand.
4. The last 3 cards are your front hand.
5. Check the order: back at least as strong as middle, middle at least as strong as front.
6. Reveal and compare front with front, middle with middle and back with back.

An example: with a flush in the back, a straight in the middle and a pair in the front, the order holds, because a flush outranks a straight and a straight outranks a pair.

Chinese poker rules for the three hands

Chinese poker rules are the same ones that govern pusoy, and they come down to hand ranks and the 3-5-5 split. Five-card hands rank as in poker, from weakest to strongest: high card, pair, two pair, three of a kind, straight, flush, full house, four of a kind, straight flush.

The front hand has only three cards, so only three outcomes exist there.

Rows are never compared across each other. Your front is tested only against an opponent’s front, your middle against their middle and your back against their back.

The 13 card game by the numbers

A 13 card game starts from a large pool of hands.

There are 635,013,559,600 different 13-card hands in a 52-card deck, written C(52,13), and once you hold one you can split it into rows in 72,072 ways. That second figure is C(13,3) × C(10,5) = 286 × 252, so setting the hand is a real decision.

So a rule of thumb helps: build the back and middle first, then check that the three leftover cards form something no stronger than the middle. If they do not, rebalance by moving a card or two.

Fouls, scoring and what to check

Foul means the rows are out of order. Scoring varies, so check the game’s own rules screen for its points.

Scoring a round of pusoy

Most tables give one point for each row you win against an opponent, with a bonus for winning all three rows. Take a ₱10-per-point game as an example. You win front and back and lose the middle against one opponent, so you are up two points minus one, which is one point, or ₱10. The ₱10 stake is a round figure chosen for this example.

Pusoy vs pusoy dos

Pusoy vs pusoy dos is a question of what you do with the 13 cards.

Suits also behave differently. In most Filipino pusoy dos games, the suit order from low to high is clubs, spades, hearts, diamonds, and it breaks ties between equal ranks. The ordering is covered in card suits order for pusoy dos. If you are new to poker-style hands, the Texas hold em betting rounds show the same hand ranks in a betting game, and a list of ten games puts pusoy beside nine others.