Pineapple

It’s Hold’em, except you start with three cards and throw one away before the flop

You get three hole cards instead of two. Before the flop you have to discard one. After that it’s plain Hold’em: two hole cards, five board cards, best five of seven.

Nothing else changes. It’s the same blinds, the same betting structure, and the same any-combination showdown. It’s just that every starting hand is better than it would have been, because you picked your best two of three.

30-second cheat sheet

• Three hole cards each. Discard one, face down, before the flop. The discard is dead.
• WSOP version: you play the pre-flop betting round with all three cards, then discard, then the flop comes.
• After the discard, it’s regular Hold’em. Use zero, one, or two hole cards with the board.
• High hand only. No qualifiers, no splits.
• Any structure: limit, pot-limit, or no-limit.
• It’s the plain version. Crazy Pineapple is the one you’ll see more often.

Full rules

The deal

Button, small blind, big blind, any betting structure. Each player gets three cards face down. First betting round with all three cards in hand.

The discard

Under the WSOP’s rules, every player must discard one of the three cards after the first round of betting is complete and before the flop is exposed. The discarded card is dead: it’s not shown and it can’t come back.

The rest of the hand

Flop, betting, turn, betting, river, betting, showdown. All other Hold’em rules apply (burns, button, blinds, betting structure).

Showdown

High hand only. Best five from the two cards you kept plus the five board cards. Any combination, including none (the board plays). Ordinary rankings, ties split, odd chip by position from the button. Nothing is qualified or split. Hi-lo three-card variants are a different game (see Crazy Pineapple Hi-Lo).

Rooms disagree

When the discard happens. This is the defining step of the game, and sources disagree on it.

• WSOP: after the first betting round, before the flop. This is the canonical source for this page.
• Pagat, Wikipedia, Wizard of Odds, BeatTheFish: before any betting. You look at three, throw one away, then the pre-flop betting round happens with two cards.

The WSOP is the outlier, but it’s the live-room rule text. If the dealer calls “Pineapple”, ask when the discard is. It changes pre-flop values.

Some sources also use “Pineapple” for any three-card Hold’em (Crazy, Lazy/Tahoe, Super Hold’em). WSOP’s rules keep the plain name for the pre-flop-discard game.

Worked examples

Keeping the best two

Alice keeps the two hearts, tosses the 2 of clubs

Board

Alicethrew

• Ace-high flush✓ wins

Bobthrew

• Pair of Queens

Alice scoops the whole pot.

Alice was dealt ace and king of hearts and the 2 of clubs. She kept the hearts. The flop brought three more hearts, and now she has an ace-high flush. Bob kept a pair of queens, discarded a five, and has a pair of queens.

The blind discard

Alice throws away a jack before the flop, and the flop is two jacks

Board

Alicethrew

• Two pair, Queens and Jacks

Bobthrew

• Three Jacks✓ wins

Bob scoops the whole pot.

Under the WSOP version Alice had to discard before seeing the flop. She held queen-queen-jack, kept the queens, and threw out the jack of hearts. The flop was jack-jack-four. Bob, who kept a jack, made trips. Alice has queens and jacks, two pair, and loses to three jacks. Had she kept a jack instead, she would have been the one with trips.

How you’ll embarrass yourself

• Discarding at the wrong time. In the WSOP version you discard after pre-flop betting, before the flop. Pitching the card before betting is the other version, and it changes pre-flop values.
• Thinking three-card hands are better flop hands. Everyone’s starting hand is stronger, so top pair and two pair are overvalued.
• Mixing it up with Omaha. There’s no “exactly two” rule. You still play any combination of your two remaining cards, including none.
• Confusing it with OFC Pineapple. That’s an Open-Face Chinese variant, a different game.

Lore and reputation

Plain Pineapple is the least-played of the three-card Hold’em family. Crazy Pineapple is the one most often spread. The Wizard of Vegas forum host said in a 2024 thread that he had never heard of a casino offering Pineapple and thinks of it as a home or dealer’s-choice game. One poster recalled seeing it dealt in a downtown Las Vegas casino 25 to 30 years earlier, and another had sat in a Foxwoods 2/5 PLO/Pineapple mixed game. Those are anecdotes, not room rules.

The WSOP’s current live-action rules still define Pineapple and Crazy Pineapple under “Hold’em variations”, which is why a dealer’s-choice live game can call it.

A claim that Pineapple appeared in California card rooms in the 1980s and spread online in the early 2000s shows up on poker-content sites such as Pokerology, citing Sklansky. We couldn’t verify that, so treat it as unsourced.