How to play Kitti

Everybody puts an equal stake into the middle and is dealt nine cards face down. You look at them, and you either pack and sit the deal out, or you split your nine into three hands of three.

There are no turns, no trumps and nothing to follow. Once everybody has split their cards, the hands are turned over one at a time and compared, and the best hand takes that round. Three rounds, and then the pot goes to whoever met the winning condition.

So Kitti has exactly one decision in it. Everything after the split is arithmetic, which is why a deal takes a minute and why the split is worth thinking about.

1. Everybody puts one stake into the pot.
2. The dealer gives nine cards to each player, face down.
3. Starting to the dealer’s right, each player either packs or splits their nine cards into three hands.
4. When everybody has spoken, the hands are shown.

Packing costs you the stake you have already put in. It is worth doing only when a hand is hopeless, because once your stake is in, playing on costs nothing more. The one thing packing saves you from is the extra stake a salami collects.

Your three hands must be laid out strongest first. This is the rule the game turns on, and it is the part every newcomer gets wrong, because every other card game lets you hold something back.

Here you cannot. If you make a trail, it goes down in round one whether that suits you or not.

Nine cards split three ways gives 280 possible hands, and the order is settled the moment you choose one. That is the whole decision and there is nothing left to play afterwards.

The interesting part is that strength does not add up. A hand that is enormous in round one wins the same single round a merely good hand would, and the material you spent on it is gone.

Hands rank the way they do in Teen Patti. Any hand of a higher kind beats any hand of a lower one, so the worst run beats the best colour.

1. Trail: three of the same rank. Three aces is the best, three twos the worst.
2. Pure run: three in order, all one suit.
3. Run: three in order, mixed suits.
4. Colour: three of one suit, not in order.
5. Pair: two of the same rank, and an odd card.
6. High card: none of the above.

Runs need care, because this is where tables disagree and where a pot gets argued over.

This table plays ace, king, queen as the best run and ace, two, three as the second. Many tables in Nepal and the whole Brag tradition have it the other way round, so it is a setting on the game’s page. King, ace, two is not a run under either.

Suits never break a tie. Two hands with the same ranks are equal, which is what makes a drawn round possible.

1. Everybody turns over their first hand. The best one takes round one.
2. The winner of round one shows first in round two, and so on.
3. The third hands go down last.

If two hands tie for best, nobody takes that round. It is drawn, and a drawn round counts for neither of them.

Nothing is decided during the showing. You cannot hold a hand back, reorder it or bluff with it, so once the cards are down the deal plays itself out.

Four cards of one rank among your nine is shown straight away and takes the deal on the spot. If two players have four of a kind, the higher rank wins.

This is not a bonus so much as a necessity. Four of a kind cannot be split across three hands without being broken up, so the ordinary shape of the game has no good answer for it.

Two other rules are off unless the table turns them on. Four pairs among your nine voids the deal: nobody wins, everybody stakes again, and the cards come round again.

The other is the two, three, five. Where it is played, those three cards in three different suits beat everything, a trail of aces included. All three suits must differ, so a two, three and five with two cards of one suit is an ordinary high-card hand and nothing more.