JILI77 Pusoy Go: Front, Middle and Back Hand Rules

Pusoy Go is the thirteen-card version of Pusoy: you receive your cards, set them into three hands of your own choosing, and your hands are measured against every opponent’s. It is a classic Philippine card game in the baraha games lineup, and the whole skill lies in how you split the deal. This page covers how to set the hands, how the three comparisons run and how the doubling works. The ranking of each combination sits on the Pusoy card ranking page.

What Pusoy Go is

Pusoy Go is a JILI title. JILI’s own game page describes it as the traditional four-player poker game from the Philippines, and lists June 2023 as its publish time. Open the Kard sa laro section of the JILI77 lobby, where JILI is one of six listed studios, and search for the title there.

Setting the three hands in Pusoy Go

You choose how to split your thirteen cards, and the choice is the game. There are 286 ways to pick the three front cards and then 252 ways to pick the five middle cards from the remaining ten, which is 72,072 different settings of one deal.

The back hand must be your strongest and the front your weakest. Follow these steps when the cards arrive.

1. Sort the thirteen cards by rank and mark every pair, triple, flush and straight.
2. Build the strongest five-card back hand you can.
3. Build the middle hand from what is left, keeping it below the back hand.
4. Put the three remaining cards in front, making sure they rank below the middle hand.
5. Check the order, then confirm.

How the hands are compared and scored

After everyone confirms, your front hand is compared with each opponent’s front hand, your middle with their middle and your back with their back. That is three comparisons against each opponent, and the stronger hand wins each one by the combination ranking.

In the usual scoring you gain one unit per comparison won and pay one per comparison lost. A three-card hand is compared as high card, pair or three of a kind, and a pair or better appears in only 17.18 percent of three-card hands, which is 3,796 of 22,100. That makes a pair or better in front a real advantage.

Pusoy and Winner takes all

JILI’s game page describes two doublings. Winning all three comparisons against a single opponent triggers a doubling called Pusoy. Winning all three comparisons against all three opponents triggers Winner takes all, a second doubling.

The two bonuses reward a balanced set.

A back hand that is excellent but a front hand that is empty wins one comparison and loses two, so you do not trigger either doubling. The game’s rules screen prints the stake and the value of each comparison before you play. A set that breaks the order, with the middle hand stronger than the back or the front stronger than the middle, is a misset, and the rules screen prints its penalty. Compare your hands from back to front before you confirm.

If you want to see how a different baraha game scores its round, the Tongits Go hand sequence works through a draw-and-meld game with no hand-setting at all.