“Turbo”

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One of the reasons people like Pineapple is the speed of play. Regular OFC sometimes plays out very slowly. This is especially true 3 and 4 handed, but even Heads Up sometimes slows to a crawl. Although Pineapple-OFC is popular for many reasons, one of the main reasons is that there are only 4 “Pulls”/”Streets”/”Turns”, as opposed to 8 in Regular OFC (in both games you start with 5, however because you are playing 2 cards at a time in Pineapple, you go from 5 to 7, 9, 11, and finish at 13, whereas in Regular you go from 5 to 6, 7…and finish at 13).

However, Pineapple can only be played 3-handed, because of the discards. Now, some people, myself included, consider that a positive feature of Pineapple-OFC; I feel 4-handed Regular OFC is not as good as 3-handed because I believe having perfect information (all the cards will be accounted for) is too much; I believe there should be some level of uncertainty. 

That said, many people do prefer 4-handed OFC, and also, there are times in a Casino when 4 players will want to play; as a result, Regular OFC is chosen over Pineapple-OFC, even though Regular is much slower and players would prefer a faster game. Essentially, the 4-handed element of Regular-OFC is more important than the added value of having a faster game with Pineapple-OFC.

This post offers a compromise game – one that mimics the speed of Pineapple-OFC but also keeps the 4-handed nature of Regular-OFC. A few of us back during the summer played it from time-to-time, and we called it “Turbo” (I do realize that Turbo can refer to other games as well). If anyone has another name for the game, please let me know.

Turbo plays out quite simple – you are dealt 2 at a time instead of 1 at a time, and you must play both cards. It’s as simple as that. Because you only see 13 cards, FantasyLand remains at QQ, and the bonus remains 13 cards. 

That’s it. I realize that this game is nothing revolutionary, but for the most part, people do not seem to reconigze that Turbo is an entirely reasonable compromise when you have 4 players, but do not want to play something as slow as Regular-OFC.

As always, I welcome any thoughts, comments or suggestions.