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Oh labrowwwwwwwwn....
Went to a poker gathering last night, with one house rule: no Texas Hold 'Em. We played 7-card stud, 5-card draw, the usuals, and then some interesting variants. Baseball, Cincinnati, and others. Then we got creative.
I added a variant to the night that was a big hit, because it subtly changes the betting strategies quite radically. It can be added to any type of poker, I think.
Before dealing, draw a card from the deck. This is the base card. For our purposes, let's call it a 4.
Now, the wild card for the game is that base card... plus the number of people still in the game. If you start with six players, then the first round of betting, the wild is a 10. If someone folds, now 9s are wild, 10s aren't.
This forces you to predict, and try to influence, how many people are left in the game on the final betting round. 4s will obviously never be wild, and 5s will be wild only when one person has one. The interesting values are 6, 7, and 8, where you have 2, 3, or 4 people left in the game. People with 6s are going to want to force everyone else out but one opponent, while those with 7s are going to try and entice one other player to stay in. Someone heavy in 8s is going to try and keep *two* extra people in, so they're not likely to push the bet value.
One final detail: it's modulo 13 math, A as one. If the base card is a Q, for instance, that's 12. Six players would make the first wild card a 5. 12 + 6 - 13 = 5.
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badger had a good term for this, it's monetizing the mere *presence* of players, as well as their hands. Now, you have to know which players you can entice to stay, as well as those you can scare off... and you have to do so when their desires for this specific hand might conflict with their normal natures. If someone has a crappy hand showing, but you need their seat filled for the final bet, how do you keep them in, without scaring them off? And, what if they have hidden potential wilds that are the same value as yours? Or worse, one higher?
It really shoves the game from a numerical one to a social/psychological one quite abruptly. I think it would work best with games where people have partial information of their opponent's hands, but it should be applicable as a wild variant in pretty much any game. I was trying to come up with a snappy name for it, but Walking Wilds was about as good as I got, although there might be a tie-in to Lou Reed there that would be cute. Any ideas? Or, given that I suspect this is a known variant that someone came up with a loooooong time ago, is there an established name for it? :)
I added a variant to the night that was a big hit, because it subtly changes the betting strategies quite radically. It can be added to any type of poker, I think.
Before dealing, draw a card from the deck. This is the base card. For our purposes, let's call it a 4.
Now, the wild card for the game is that base card... plus the number of people still in the game. If you start with six players, then the first round of betting, the wild is a 10. If someone folds, now 9s are wild, 10s aren't.
This forces you to predict, and try to influence, how many people are left in the game on the final betting round. 4s will obviously never be wild, and 5s will be wild only when one person has one. The interesting values are 6, 7, and 8, where you have 2, 3, or 4 people left in the game. People with 6s are going to want to force everyone else out but one opponent, while those with 7s are going to try and entice one other player to stay in. Someone heavy in 8s is going to try and keep *two* extra people in, so they're not likely to push the bet value.
One final detail: it's modulo 13 math, A as one. If the base card is a Q, for instance, that's 12. Six players would make the first wild card a 5. 12 + 6 - 13 = 5.
badger had a good term for this, it's monetizing the mere *presence* of players, as well as their hands. Now, you have to know which players you can entice to stay, as well as those you can scare off... and you have to do so when their desires for this specific hand might conflict with their normal natures. If someone has a crappy hand showing, but you need their seat filled for the final bet, how do you keep them in, without scaring them off? And, what if they have hidden potential wilds that are the same value as yours? Or worse, one higher?It really shoves the game from a numerical one to a social/psychological one quite abruptly. I think it would work best with games where people have partial information of their opponent's hands, but it should be applicable as a wild variant in pretty much any game. I was trying to come up with a snappy name for it, but Walking Wilds was about as good as I got, although there might be a tie-in to Lou Reed there that would be cute. Any ideas? Or, given that I suspect this is a known variant that someone came up with a loooooong time ago, is there an established name for it? :)
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Either way, the game's already a social/psychological one, unless you're holding the nuts. You can't play enough live hands in one night to make the numbers dominate the psychology, especially when you're talking about a room full of amateurs.
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Doing a simple 'num of participants' would be possible, sure, but we liked the added randomness.
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I would go into this game assuming that there would usually be at most 3 people at any showdown with enough money in to make it worth sweating, which reduces the wild card to a pretty binary choice. I think it'd be quite rare to see 4 or more people in for the showdown with a significant pot--if that's common, it likely either means you're essentially playing for matchsticks (i.e. nobody cares about losing much), or you all have very similar aggression levels and styles, so you tend to all push at the same points in a hand.
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See, for us the real object was just to have fun. If we were in this for money, I'm sure we'd be purists as well, and want to eliminate as many variables as possible. Instead, we enjoy playing with the rules, and seeing what strategies come out of it. I guess that's the difference between game theory and gaming.
Well that's different.
The problem is, the "strategies" that come out of it are kind of...odd, if the object isn't to accumulate the most chips. That's like saying "well, we were playing war, but the object wasn't to defeat the other side," isn't it? I understand the idea of wanting to take out the psychology from normal poker, and then noting that this wild-card thing puts it back even for a non-learning robot player, but hell, even chess grandmasters use psychology, and that's a game of complete information. I don't think you can separate psychology from the basic strategy of poker, nor, therefore, the cost of information. Beating someone who plays strictly positive poker (i.e. always value bets and never bluffs) is very easy, so you can't really call that a decent strategy. Or, at least, I sure wouldn't.
Actually, the things you describe (wanting people to stay in, etc.) are pretty common if you play at any of the online play money sites, especially "cash" (i.e. non-tournament) games with low limits. Since it's play money, there's little incentive to play "rationally" (or "purist" if you prefer), so there's actually social pressure against pre-flop raises and things like that, which can be really annoying, since that takes away a lot of the value of position--which is actually how professional poker players make their money; if you look at their winnings by seat, nearly all of them are negative in all the seats except for the button(dealer's seat) and a couple seats before it, in games that use position. (obviously we're talking about hold-em in that case, since that's about 97% of all online poker, near as I can tell)
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I almost posted a different initial 'M' word, but didn't figure you'd want that shared Outside the Circle. :)