The Sidehand Booklet

Chapter one

The run

A campaign is three acts, and you choose where they happen. Before act 1, the Deal lays two venues face up: pick the table you sit down at. After act 1’s boss you choose act 2 the same way, with the deck you have built by then. Act 3 is always the Final Table.

Each act is a branching map you cross one node at a time, and each act ends in a boss. Beat the Final Table’s boss and you have won; lose all your health at any point and the run is over.

The venues
Venue	Act	House rule	Boss
The Green Table	1	Classic Hold'em	Stonewall
The Muck	1	No-Limp	The Grinder
The Flop House	1	Bomb Pot	LAG
The Fish Tank	1	Door Card	Whale
The Cold Deck	2	Classic Hold'em	Gear Shift
Under the Gun	2	Push or Fold	Maniac
The River	2	Kill Pot	Fox
Sky's the Limit	2	Fixed Limit	TAG
The Final Table	3	Classic Hold'em	Adaptive Read

A venue's house rule plays its first fight and its boss, and most of the fights between; the others roll another table rule, or none (chapter 8). On your first campaign the Green Table is already picked; one tap changes it.

Two things carry through a run: your health, which only heals at camps and through certain cards, and your deck (52 cards to start), which you permanently rebuild as you go. You keep nothing between runs except bankroll, which buys new options rather than raw power.

Three ways to play

Campaign

The run described above. On a new save, Play starts First Steps instead: a short course that teaches poker from zero, then sends you to your first campaign (chapter 11).

Quick Match

A single fight, no run: a Duel against one opponent, a Table of three, or a duel at any table you own, under its house rule.

Daily Deal

One seeded fight a day, the same deal for everybody, with a deck that is already built.

Chapter two

A fight is a game of Hold'em

Combat is real Texas Hold'em against one opponent (a Duel) or up to three (a Table). You each have chips and a health bar. Chips are the poker game; health is the fight. Win pots to deal damage, and reduce the opponent to zero health, or take all their chips.

The hand, step by step

1 · Blinds

Small and big blind are posted. Blinds rise every six hands, so a fight cannot last forever.

2 · Draw & discard

You are dealt three hole cards and must discard one before the flop. This is the game's twist on Hold'em, and the discard is not thrown away. It goes to your Sidehand.

3 · Pre-flop betting

Bet, call, raise or fold with your remaining two cards.

4 · Flop, turn, river

Five community cards arrive across three more betting rounds. You may play Sidehand cards at any point.

5 · Showdown

Best five-card hand takes the pot. If you win it, the pot converts into damage.

Running out of chips ends you

This is a tournament, not a cash game: inside a fight there is no rebuy. Reach zero chips and you are eliminated on the spot, whatever your health bar says. The same is true of your opponents, which is a second way to win a fight. When a campaign busts, the table offers one REBUY per run: 30 bankroll, paid from that run’s winnings first, puts you back on the map at full health, just before the fight you lost.

Your chip count turns amber under six big blinds and red under three. Watch it against the blinds rather than against itself: 60 chips is comfortable at 5/10 and is push-or-fold at 25/50.

Folding is a move, not a surrender

When you fold, you choose one of your remaining hole cards to keep. It goes straight to your Sidehand. A folded hand still pays you, in ammunition rather than chips.

This is the single most important habit to build. New players fold reluctantly because folding feels like losing. Here a fold is the cheapest way to stock your Sidehand, and the blinds you lose are usually worth less than the card you gain.

Make them fold: the steal

Bet, and if every opponent folds, the pot is yours without a showdown, and it still hurts: every opponent who folded takes damage from the pot you stole (chapter 3). A showdown pays for your cards; a steal pays for the pot. The Calling Station never folds, so it cannot be stolen from.

The blind schedule

Blind schedule · by hand number
Hands	Small	Big
1–6	5	10
7–12	10	20
13–18	15	30
19–24	25	50
25–30	40	80
31+	60	120

Fights under Turbo run this schedule three times as fast: the blinds go up every two hands. In a kill pot they are doubled for one hand. Stakes 3 starts the schedule four hands deeper.

Chapter three

How damage is calculated

Winning a pot converts it into damage. The size of the pot matters, but it is under a square root, so the hand you win with matters far more than the chips you win.

damage = floor( √chips won × 3 × hand multiplier × sidehand bonus × boss weakness )

Doubling the pot multiplies damage by about 1.41. Upgrading from a pair to a full house multiplies it by 2.25. Chasing better hands beats chasing bigger pots.

Hand multipliers · standard table
Rank	Hand	×	Note
9	Five of a Kind	7.00	Only reachable with wild cards
8	Straight Flush	5.00
7	Four of a Kind	3.00
6	Full House	2.25
5	Flush	1.75
4	Straight	1.50
3	Three of a Kind	1.25
2	Two Pair	1.10
1	Pair	1.00
0	High Card	1.00

A steal pays for the pot, not the hand

When everyone folds to you, each opponent who folded takes:

steal damage = floor( √pot × 3 × 0.6 × sidehand bonus )

No hand multiplier and no boss weakness: nobody saw your cards. A damage bonus banked on your health bar can be spent on a steal.

Bosses rewrite the table

Every boss fight swaps the multiplier table for one of its own, and the map tells you which before you commit. A boss is a different scoring system more than a bigger opponent, and the counter is to rebuild your deck toward the hands it pays for. Elite fights and missions can use these tables too: check the node before you walk in.

Multiplier presets
Hand	Standard	Flush Zone	Pair Factory	Straight Alley
High Card	1.00	1.00	1.00	1.00
Pair	1.00	0.80	2.00	0.80
Two Pair	1.10	0.90	2.50	0.90
Three of a Kind	1.25	1.00	1.50	1.00
Straight	1.50	1.20	1.00	3.00
Flush	1.75	3.00	0.50	1.50
Full House	2.25	2.00	2.00	2.00
Four of a Kind	3.00	2.50	5.00	2.50
Straight Flush	5.00	5.00	5.00	5.00
Five of a Kind	7.00	7.00	10.00	7.00

Every boss also resists one hand (its damage ×½) and is vulnerable to another (×3). Both are shown on the map from the first row of the act, so you can build toward it.

Read the table before you sculpt. In Pair Factory a flush pays half damage and a pair pays double. A deck built for flushes walks into that fight at a disadvantage no amount of good play fixes.

Chapter four

The Sidehand

The Sidehand is a second hand of cards you play onto the poker game. It is the magic, and it holds up to six cards.

6 slots

Where the cards come from

Every discard

The card you drop during Draw & Discard. This happens every single hand, so the Sidehand fills whether you play or not.

Every fold

You keep one hole card from the hand you folded.

Refill

A card with the Refill enhancement draws three more.

When you gain a seventh card the game stops and makes you discard one first. Spend cards before that happens: a full Sidehand is wasted income.

The four ways to spend a card

Onto a card

Drop it on any hole card or community card. A plain card adds its rank to the target's rank: a 5 turns a 9 into an Ace. Ranks wrap around past Ace.

An enhanced card does its own thing instead: give the target its suit or its rank, turn it wild, cap it at Ace. See chapter five.

Onto your health

Hearts heal. You recover health equal to the card's rank: a King restores 13.

Any other suit becomes aggression instead: your next win deals +1% damage per rank point. A Queen is +12%.

Onto the pot

Adds rank × big blind chips to the pot out of thin air. A 10 at 20/40 blinds adds 400 chips, and since damage scales with the pot you win, this is a damage move as much as a chip move.

Onto another Sidehand card

Combine two into one: ranks add together, the second card's suit is kept. Two low cards become one high card. This is how you turn chaff into an Ace.

Cards marked Doubled or Tripled multiply all four of these uses: the rank added, the healing, the damage bonus and the chips. And a King adds 13, which wraps a rank all the way round to itself: play Kings on your health or on the pot, not on a card.

Chapter five

Enhancements

Enhancements are permanent properties printed onto individual cards in your deck. They travel with that card for the rest of the run.

Where they come from: packs

Win a fight and three booster packs are dealt face up. Take one: it holds five cards, three from the pack's own theme and two from a shared pool (Doubled, Tripled, Destroy, Convert Suit, Rank Shifts). The shop sells each pack by name.

Pack	Its theme
Match Pack	Wilds that fire when cards match
Cap Pack	Push ranks up without wrapping
Transform Pack	Turn a card into another card
Trick Pack	See more, fold better, copy cards
Snowball Pack	Get paid in gold, chips and health

The colour is the grade: Common · Uncommon · Rare · Epic · Legendary. The rarer the grade, the rarer the drop. An elite fight promises at least one Rare card in every pack it offers, a boss at least one Epic. There is one Legendary, and only Match packs hold it.

Transformers

Override the target instead of adding to it. A break is not a card flip failing: a broken card is removed from your deck for the rest of the run, enhancement and all. At the 20-card deck floor only the enhancement breaks, and the card stays.

Sym	Name	Effect
⇌	Swap Suit	Gives the target this card's suit
↨	Swap Rank	Gives the target this card's rank
💔A	Fragile Ace	Turns the target into an Ace. 20% chance this card is permanently destroyed when used
💔∞	Fragile Wild	Turns the target fully wild. 30% chance this card is permanently destroyed when used

Conditional wilds

These only fire when the Sidehand card matches the target. That restriction is the price of the strongest effects in the game.

Sym	Name	Fires when	Result
S∞	Suit ➔ Wild Suit	Suits match	Target's suit becomes wild
R∞	Rank ➔ Wild Rank	Ranks match	Target's rank becomes wild
∞∞	Rank ➔ Full Wild	Ranks match	Target becomes fully wild
★∞	Any Match ➔ Full Wild	Rank or suit matches	Target becomes fully wild. The Legendary

Wild cards are how Five of a Kind exists. A fully wild card counts as any rank and any suit, which puts a hand on the table that real poker cannot reach, and it pays 7× on the standard table, 10× against Pair Factory.

Amplifiers

Sym	Name	Effect
×2	Doubled	This card counts double: the rank added, the healing, the damage bonus and the chips
×3	Tripled	This card counts triple: the rank added, the healing, the damage bonus and the chips
🔒	Cap at Ace	Rank increases stop and lock at Ace instead of wrapping past it
🔒💔	Fragile Cap	Same cap while held in the Sidehand, but each shift has a 20% chance of destroying this card permanently

Cap at Ace is quieter than it looks. Without it, adding rank to a high card wraps it back around to a low one; the cap turns every rank addition into a guaranteed improvement.

Economy

Sym	Name	Effect
💰	Golden	+5 gold whenever the card is played or scored
🪙	Tithe	+10 chips to your stack when played
🩸	Vampiric	+3 health when played or scored

Information and utility

Sym	Name	Effect
👁️	Clairvoyant	Reveals the next community card before it lands
🔍	Scanner	Reveals one of the opponent's hole cards
+3🃏	Refill	Draw three Sidehand cards when played
♻️	Scavenger	While anywhere in play: folding collects every hole card, not just one

Chapter six

Sculpting your deck

Open your deck from the map (the Deck button) and rebuild it, permanently, with the cards your packs gave you. This is the strategic layer: the deck you finish a run with should not be the deck you started it with.

Enhance

Put an enhancement from your inventory on a specific card. It stays on that card for the rest of the run.

Destroy

Remove a card from the deck entirely. A thinner deck draws its good cards more often, which is often stronger than adding anything. A deck never goes below 20 cards.

Clone

Add an exact copy of a card, enhancement included.

Rank Shift · Convert Suit

Move a card's rank up or down by 1, 2 or 3, or change its suit outright, reshaping the deck toward the hands the next boss actually pays for.

After a win you can also let the game do it: Lazy Apply spends the whole pack on your deck at random, and Keep & Go to Map banks the pack for later.

Sculpting is where a boss gets answered. Facing Flush Zone, narrowing your deck toward two suits raises your flush frequency far more reliably than hoping for one.

The deck builder: the full deck laid out card by card beside an inventory of enhancement items. — The deck builder: every card in the deck, individually editable

Chapter seven

The table is reading you back

Opponents do not play a fixed script. They watch how you play this fight and adapt to it. At a real table this is called your Table Image.

Fold your weak hands and show strong ones, and they start to believe your bets: they fold more often, and your steals land. Get caught bluffing, or keep winning with weak hands, and they stop believing you: they call you down.

A reputation is slow to build and quick to lose, exactly as at a real table. It starts fresh every fight.

Each opponent's frame shows how readily they fold: a flag and one to three dots (rarely, sometimes, often). The way you play moves the dots. An opponent who loses a big pot goes on tilt for two hands: it bluffs more and folds less, one dot fewer.

Tells

Each archetype has a tell verbosity. Talkative opponents leak information about their hand strength in the battle log; quiet ones give you almost nothing and have to be read from their betting patterns alone.

Chapter eight

The map

Each act is a branching graph. You choose one node per row, so a run is a sequence of trade-offs: health against gold, safety against a better deck.

Node types
Icon	Node	What happens
⚔	Battle	A standard fight against one or more archetypes
★ ⚔	Elite	Always under a table rule. Pays more, and a better pack
🎯	Mission	A fight with an objective: make a hand, steal a number of chips, or land one big hit
💀	Boss	Act finale. Rewrites the hand multiplier table; the weakness is telegraphed
🛒	Shop	Booster packs by name, and single cards off the shelf
🏕	Camp	Pick one: heal 30 HP, +10 max HP, or trade 3 unused cards for 1 rarer than the best of them

Missions

Complete the objective and the fight is won on the spot, for double gold and a pack. Win the fight without it and you are paid half, and no pack. The node's details say so before you walk in.

The shop shelf

A pack costs 40 gold. A single card costs 10 gold (Common or Uncommon), 20 (Rare), 35 (Epic) or 50 (Legendary), but the shelf only sells cards you have unlocked with bankroll (chapter 10).

Table rules

Every fight on the map plays one table rule or none, and its node says which. A venue's first fight and its boss play its house rule. The fights between roll: the house rule most often, plain Hold'em, a spice rule that can turn up at any table (Turbo, Thin Blood, Short Stack, Deep Stack), or a house rule you have already played under. A ★ elite always has a rule. The Daily Deal plays one a day, and Stakes 5 takes plain Hold'em out of the roll. One table rule per fight, never two.

Turbo

The blinds go up every 2 hands instead of every 6. Blind pressure: you cannot wait for a perfect hand.

Turbo tournaments raise the blinds fast so a whole tournament fits in an evening; online poker made them an everyday format.

Thin Blood

All damage is 25% higher, for both sides. Fights end fast in whichever direction they were already going.

Short Stack

Everyone starts with 120 chips. Every pot is a bigger share of your stack.

Short-stacked play is how every tournament ends: with few big blinds, each hand you play can be your last.

Deep Stack

Everyone starts with 400 chips. With deep stacks a big hand can win a big pot, so drawing hands get paid.

Deep-stack tournaments start everyone with many big blinds, so there is room to play poker before the blinds bite.

Bomb Pot

Everyone antes one big blind and every hand starts on the flop. Post-flop play: every hand sees a flop, so the board decides.

A home-game and card-room favourite: everyone antes, nobody bets before the flop, and every pot starts big.

Push or Fold

Every hand, everyone has 10 big blinds, and every bet is all-in. Short-stack tournament poker: with ten big blinds you move in or you fold.

From the end of tournaments: with ten big blinds or fewer, strong players mostly move all-in or fold, and push-or-fold charts were worked out for exactly that spot.

Door Card

One flop card is dealt face up before anyone bets. Read the board early: you know one card of the flop before you put a chip in.

In Stud your first face-up card is your door card. Courchevel, a French form of Omaha named after the ski resort, deals one flop card face up before the first bet.

Kill Pot

When a player wins two pots in a row, the next hand is a kill pot: the blinds are doubled. Pressure comes in streaks: a kill pot is the hand to have your best card ready.

From the limit card rooms: when one player wins two pots in a row, the stakes go up for the next hand, and that hand is a kill pot.

No-Limp

Before the flop you cannot just call the big blind: raise or fold. Come in raising or not at all: limping is a beginner's most common leak.

Some card rooms and home games ban limping to keep the game lively: whoever enters a pot first must raise.

Fixed Limit

Every bet and raise is a fixed size: one big blind before the turn, two big blinds after. Every call is a price you can count: call when the pot pays more than it costs. A street allows four bets at most.

Limit Hold'em was the casino game for decades; No-Limit took over when televised tournaments made the all-in famous in the 2000s.

An act map: a branching path of battle, camp, shop and mission nodes. — An act map: locked nodes show what is coming before you choose your route

Chapter nine

The twelve opponents

Every opponent is defined by three numbers: how often they raise, how tight they play, and how often they bluff. There is a correct counter-strategy to each, and the game tells you what it is if you tap the info icon during a fight.

Archetypes
Opponent	Plays like	How to beat them
Calling Station	Never folds to a bet, and never bluffs. Opens every act	Never bluff. Value-bet relentlessly with any made hand
Maniac	Raises about one hand in four with anything at all. Boss of Under the Gun (Two Pair ½, Three of a Kind ×3). Its clause there: Open Season. It raises every hand before the flop, and takes 10 damage whenever it is caught bluffing	Let them bet for you. Trap with checks and call down wider
Rock	Folds to any bet of half the pot unless strong. A big raise means a monster	Steal their blinds. Fold to any big raise: they have it
Fox	It slow-plays: holding a strong hand it checks, then raises your bet	Play straightforwardly and avoid guessing games
TAG	Plays only its best starting hands, and bets every street it plays	Respect their raises; attack when they show weakness
LAG	Bets every flop it sees, and bets the turn again if you only call	Widen your calling range and let them hang themselves
Shark	Counts how often you fold to raises. Fold a lot and it bluffs you more	Do not fold to every raise. It is counting
The Tell	Only raises with a real hand, and the log says so first	Read the log. The information is genuinely reliable
The Grinder	Ahead on HP it tightens up; behind, it bluffs more. Boss of The Muck (Pair ½, Two Pair ×3). Its clause there: The Grind. While its HP bar is fuller than yours, it heals 3 HP every hand	Get ahead on HP, then call its bluffs down
Stonewall	Boss of the Green Table. Halves pair damage, triples two pair	Rebuild toward two pair before the fight
Gear Shift	Boss of the Cold Deck. Every three hands it switches: TIGHT (no bluffs), then AGGRO (bluffs a lot)	Re-read them every few hands; last hand's model is stale
Adaptive Read	Boss of the Final Table. Caught bluffing, it calls you lighter. Show strong hands and it folds more	Bluff rarely against it; let your strong hands buy you folds

Chapter ten

Between runs

Death is not a reset. Every run pays bankroll, win or lose, and bankroll buys options that persist forever. Quick Match and the Daily Deal pay a little too.

bankroll = ( battles won × 4 + act reached × 20 + 40 if you won + stakes × 10 ) × (1 + precision grade)

Precision grade is the part you control with skill rather than progress. The game silently grades every betting decision against its correct play and averages how much expected value you gave away. Play well in a losing run and you can out-earn a sloppy winning one.

Unlocks

Every card can turn up in a pack from your very first run. What bankroll buys is the right to pick a card by name off the shop shelf. The price is its grade:

Grade	Bankroll
Common	20
Uncommon	100
Rare	200
Epic	300
Legendary	400

Starter decks

Deck	What changes	Cost
Standard	The usual 52 cards	free
The Purist	No Sidehand at all, +30% showdown damage	free
Short Deck	36 cards, 2s through 5s removed. Big hands far more often	50
Ace High	20 cards, 10 through Ace only. You see most of your deck, and so does the table	150
Three Suits	39 cards, no Hearts. Flushes far more often	250
Suited	Two suits only. Flushes everywhere	400

Stakes (difficulty)

Each rung adds to the ones below it. Bought with bankroll.

1

Opponents carry +15% HP. (60)

2

Your maximum HP is 80 instead of 100. (100)

3

Blinds start four hands deeper. (150)

4

Your Sidehand holds 5 cards instead of 6. (220)

5

Every battle carries a table rule: plain Hold'em leaves the roll. (300)

6

Your Sidehand holds 4 cards instead of 5. (400)

Bankroll never buys power. No damage upgrades, no bonus health. It buys new ways to play and harder ways to be tested. A veteran and a new player fight the same fight.

Chapter eleven

Learning actual poker

Everything you learn here transfers to a real table, because the poker underneath is real poker.

First Steps

A prologue and four short chapters that teach poker from zero, at a table, one idea at a time: The Hands (which hand beats which), The Chips (the pot, calling, folding, betting), The Fight (the pot becomes damage) and The Magic (your Sidehand). After the prologue it asks whether you already know poker and starts you at the right chapter; I know this skips ahead. Every lesson can be replayed from the First Steps map.

The practice wing (Learn Poker)

Lessons

Nine written chapters, from what beats what through betting rounds and structures to counting outs, pot equity, the Rule of 4 and 2, break-even reference tables, and implied odds.

Drills

Generated exercises at four difficulties: Count Outs, Pot Odds, Preflop, Equity Estimate and Full Decision. Quick Mix leans toward your weakest area.

Guided Scenarios (in Drills)

Hand-built scenarios that walk you through one decision at a time (The Flush Draw, The Gutshot Trap, Overcards Dilemma), explaining the maths as you go.

Your Poker Skills

The Skill Radar tracks how you actually play across five axes (pre-flop selection, pot odds, aggression, fold discipline and value sizing) from your real decisions, not from quizzes, and suggests drills for the weakest.

At the table

Help	What it does
Coach	Grades your decision as you make it and explains why. Simple says what you hold, what it is, which cards would help and what to do, with no maths. Advanced adds equity, outs and pot odds. It reads only what a real player sees: the board, the bet, the pot and your cards
Pot Odds	The price you are being offered, in several presentations: ratio, percentage, a shopping analogy, a cheat sheet
Quick Odds	A compact reference table of common situations
Board Texture	What the community cards threaten
Outs Tracker	Remaining deck and the cards that improve you
Hand Rankings	What beats what, on demand

The tools sit behind the wrench (Settings → Advanced Tools). All optional: turn on what you need and switch it off as you improve.

The Purist deck turns the Sidehand off entirely. No magic, no wilds, no enhancements: just Texas Hold'em against twelve distinct opponents, with +30% damage on the hands you win. It is a legitimate way to play the whole campaign.

Chapter twelve

Glossary

Sidehand

Your second hand of up to six magic cards, played onto the poker game.

Draw & Discard

Being dealt three hole cards and discarding one before the flop. The discard feeds the Sidehand.

Steal

Winning a pot because everyone else folded. It damages every opponent who folded.

Enhancement

A permanent property printed on one card in your deck.

Grade

A card's rarity, shown by its colour: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Legendary.

Wild

A card counting as any rank, any suit, or both. Fully wild cards make Five of a Kind possible.

Venue

Where an act is played. You choose it at the Deal.

House rule

A venue's own table rule. It plays the venue's first fight and its boss, and most of the fights between.

Spice rule

A table rule with no venue of its own: Turbo, Thin Blood, Short Stack or Deep Stack. It can turn up at any table.

Table rule

A rule the whole table plays under: a house rule, a spice rule, or the Daily's rule of the day. One per fight, named on the map; chapter 8 lists them.

Table Image

Your hidden reputation this fight. Opponents adjust to it.

Precision grade

How close your betting decisions came to correct play. Multiplies your bankroll payout.

Bankroll

Meta-currency earned every run. Buys options, never power.

Rebuy

Once per campaign: 30 bankroll to get back up after a bust.

Preset

The hand multiplier table in force. Bosses replace the standard one.

Outs

Real poker term: the cards still in the deck that would improve your hand into a winner.