Lonesome Dove

[peterbirks]

They are showing Lonesome Dove from 10pm tonight on BBC4. If you've never seen it, try to get it onto video. It's a cracker, with Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones on top form as Texas Rangers.

I'm at home today and will be until next Tuesday. I can therefore imitate the life of a profesional online poker player. Get up, forget to shower, work for three or four hours, masturbate, go out to buy some milk and a newspaper, lounge around for a couple of hours, do a few more hours' work, watch some TV, sleep.

Frightening thought, isn't it.

+++++++++

With the concept of "Team" championships abounding, why hasn't anyone come up with the idea of duplicate poker? You can't do it online, because the cheating potential is so great, but what's stopping you having 36 laptops in a single room, with six players from each country sitting in a different position at a short-handed NL table? You then play 100 or so hands.

As in duplicate bridge, the scoring system could be adjusted so that points were not awarded completely linearly. This would make saving $500 more than half as valuable as saving $1,000 (and winning $1,000 less than twice as valuable as winning $500).

Strikes me that this would be excellent for TV, because you could see how the same hand panned out at six different tables. Remember how Caro showed exactly the same hand, which flew off in a totally different direction because of one person's actions pre-flop?

Now you can see it in action.

Back to work.

PJ

Comments

[alanj]

I signed up as a beta tester for a company that's developing and marketing online duplicate holdem. Part of their angle was being considered a game of skill so as to remain legal under US law. However, that was months ago, and I haven't heard anything since. The cheating issue does seem insurmountable if you're playing for nontrivial stakes.

[andy-ward-uk.livejournal.com]

I have occasionally thought about something like that - but what happens when chips move in different directions, different players become short-stacked and even eliminated ? Even so it would be better than the reported shambles in London recently (although the Colclough/Southall story was very funny).

The main reason it hasn't been done though is that it's too hard and, according to the organisers, what's the difference poker is poker just shut up and get it in the can by midnight.

Andy.

Different stack size problem

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

As in duplicate bridge, you start afresh each hand. This is a computer-run system on laptops. Each "hand" stands alone, as if they were, for example, the questions in Harrington on Hold 'Em. You score for each hand at the end of the hand, not for the 100 hands as a whole.

PJ

Re: Different stack size problem

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Thinking through this a bit more, you could have the first five hands at 25-50 blinds with, say, 5000 chips, moving up through the blinds as you move through the competition.

Scoring could either be duplicate style (e.g., 10 points for the "best" score, followed by six points, 4 points, 3, 2, 1) or pairs style (e.g., you score as many points as the percentage by which you increase your stack, with some kind of dampener effect in play).

A third possible scoring system would be for you to score as many points as you increase your equity in some kind of theoretical tournament. This would be the closest to a "real" tournament, in that, as you progressed through the rounds, the amount by which you increase your equity when you win a hand increases. So you would have a competition whereby the average points scored in the opening round of five hands could be, say, five points, whereas by the end the average number of points scored could be 50 points. That reduces the skill but increases the televisuality. Most quizzes seem to be structured this way on TV.

PJ

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Fantastic idea about the duplicate poker!

I wonder if it would be wise to always have the button be in the same place so that each team has one player who always plays the big blind, one player who always plays the small blind and so on, if any team fancies that they have blind-playing specialists, or would you prefer the button to rotate as normal so that each team member gets to play every position at some point?

Dealin'

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Hi Chris:

I hadn't thought of that, but it's a neat idea. "Wilhelm, from Munich, is Germany's selection for the Big Blind. His defensive abilities have been seen in many of the casinos in southern Germany and Switzerland...".

On the downside, you would tend to get players with similar styles being selected to play in similar positions, which would make for less entertaining variance.

Clearly in practice this would fly off in a way that would make it completely different from standard tournament poker (just as tournament poker became a completely different game from cash), although it would have more in common with the tournament game than with cash.

I think that the reason it would work well on TV is that:

a) you have a set number of hands.
b) you get rankings of the teams after every hand.

PJ

Re: Dealin'

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Hi, Pete! I've been lurking for about a week. I was always a little scared of contacting you in the postal days because, well, I felt that I had nothing to say that might be of interest to you, and lurking as a LJ reader in the same vein is entirely par for the course.

The inspiration for the concept of designated blind players and so forth is, naturally, the Manorcon Diplomacy Tournament, or the more generalised concept of organised team tournaments in games with asymmetric positions.

I look forward to seeing last night's Football and Poker Legends Cup poker TV show, which I am currently downloading through BitTorrent. It'll be interesting to see how their teamplay format works, but I have low expectations.

[simong-uk.livejournal.com]

You reckon you can resist the urge for as much as 3 or 4 hours???

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

That's what I like about you Simon; you always zoom straight for the higher ground.

PJ

[simong-uk.livejournal.com]

Well, I realised in writing that I was leaving myself wide open to attack from a multitude of angles to a master of repartee. e.g. "That's what I like about you Simon - nothing." etc.

I have long since held the belief that the average journyman online pro's lifestyle is an easy target to dissect and riddicule. You on the other hand, give them credit for buying newspapers (when you can read the news for free (if you really want to) whilst surfing between hands), buying milk, when you can get free cups of tea down the Vic or Gutshot, etc etc. The self-abuse was a given, far cheaper than paying someone else to do it or forgoing a couple of hours EV by chasing after it on a night out.

As to the poker content, I watch close to zero TV poker although admit that something like this would be interesting. A little adaption could see several competitors be dealt the same hands against the same opponents and allow their different styles to unfold, seeing how one player crushes the table on the way to the final whilst another player "avoids accidents" all the way to the final with the same cards.