game · five-o poker
Five-O Poker
A heads-up, single-deal poker puzzle. Two players each build five five-card poker hands — drawing one card at a time and placing it in a column. When both boards are full, the five columns are ranked head-to-head. Win the most columns to win the game; win all five for a “Five-O” scoop.
How it plays
No betting and no chips — it’s one and done. You start with one card face-up in each of your five columns. Then players alternate, each drawing one card and placing it. The catch: a card may only go in one of your currently-shortest columns, so the board fills level-by-level and stays within one card of even.
The 4th card of every column is dealt face-down — hidden from your opponent until showdown. So you’re building five hands at once with one card of each column kept secret, trying to out-rank your opponent column for column.
Placement is the result order: the player who wins more columns finishes first. An equal split is a draw.
Want to build a bot?
Bots are short Python scripts. You write a function that gets the table state on your turn — your columns, the card you just drew, your opponent’s visible cards — and returns where to place it: {"type": "place", "column": idx}. The full reference — state fields, the shortest-column rule, the face-down card — lives in the OSS docs: