Poker

If you’d like to take some time off from the relentless violence of everyday life on Rook Island, liberating various outposts around the island also gradually unlocks a few places you can visit to play some poker. These are labeled on your map with a .

The game of choice on Rook Island is Texas Hold ‘Em. Each player is dealt two cards, and three are placed on the table face up as the “flop.” Two more cards are dealt face up as the round continues, and the strength of your hand is determined by your two cards plus the value of the flop to make the best poker hand of five cards. This is the favored style of poker played in most televised tournaments, as well as in most recent video games. The rank of winning hands, from best to worst, is as follows:

• Royal Flush (Ace, King, Queen, Jack, 10, all of the same suit)
• Straight Flush (five numerically consecutive cards of the same suit)
• Four of a Kind
• Full House (a three of a kind and a pair in the same hand)
• Flush (five cards of the same suit)
• Straight (five numerically consecutive cards)
• Three of a Kind
• Two Pair
• One Pair
• High Card (Ace, King, Queen, Jack, 10 through 2, in that order)

You can drop into a game for $150, $200, or $250, or play a few practice hands for no money down. Your stakes in a single game are limited to what you’ve put up plus what you’ve managed to win, so you can’t sit down to a $150 game and buy the hand with a thousand-dollar bet. As in real poker, you can always cash out and walk away with whatever you’ve got, or you can play the game until you or all of your opponents are out of chips.

In this minigame, as with the real game of poker, the key is to know when to bow out of the hand. If you’ve got nothing after seeing the flop and one of the CPU players raises the stakes, don’t throw more money into the pot “just to see how things turn out.” The CPU in Far Cry 3 does not tend to bluff, so betting more money on a bad hand won’t turn out well for you.