I appreciate the amazing feedback!
The topic of tutorialisation is something we revisited several times during development. I think each build we finished internally we added additional information to the tooltips and to the hints on screen. But the challenge was to also avoid information overload and showing pages of tutorials that would make someone click away.
I figured the first round is nearly a guaranteed success regardless of the hand you play, so long as you're playing a full hand. So I hoped that would be enough to communicate how the game worked. It's a bit like sitting down to learn a new boardgame - The host spends 15 minutes explaining the rules, but it's never until you play that first turn that everything clicks.
Glad you had fun regardless!