Bram Cohen (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} bramcohen) wrote,@ 2006-10-23 21:27:00 |
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Hold 'em Bingo
The game tringo is sort of a cross between tetris and bingo. In practice it's closer to tetris, because the shared element of play isn't all that strong.
Here is a game which is closer to bingo, but still with skill: each player selects their own hole cards, then the community cards are dealt, and the best hand wins.
With large numbers of players, this game should converge to a market equilbrium. Each player should select each possible set of hole cards with probability equal to the chances that it will be the nuts (best possible). In practice one would expect not all players to play optimally, and their bias should lead to opportunities to get ahead by playing hands which they underplay. For example, naive players are likely to overplay pair of aces, and hence split the pot among a huge number of players when that hand wins, so you could get ahead by never selecting those as hole cards. Of course, any play which assumes bias among the opponents must have bias of its own, and hence be potentially exploitable.
This game is also quite interesting with only a small number of players, but this post is about how this game works with a large number of players, so that analysis is left as an exercise to the reader.
With regular poker hands, this game is fairly homogenous and uninteresting. It would be much better to have a larger variety of possible hands, with more interesting interactions between them, and to have several community cards dealt before everyone has to pick their cards, to add to the variety. The restriction that each card can only appear once also is quite artificial in the context of this game, and should probably be eliminated. I'm open to suggestions about what a better hand structure, deck and number of community cards before and after picking might be.
Online play of this sort of game might be very quick and engaging. There could be a single large room which hundreds of people play in, and a new hand every thirty seconds, and everybody automatically puts money into the next round until they leave.
The payout structure of this sort of game is probably close to optimal for encouraging play of a gambling game. It has enough skill that in principle one could be a long term winner, but a small enough amount of available information and large enough variance that it takes a long time for 'the long run' to be likely to catch up with most players. I find this state of affairs somewhat depressing, because I personally like to play games which are designed so that the better player wins reliably, even when the skill difference is very small, because those games are the most sporting and scientific. But successful gambling games aren't about picking out who's better, they're about fostering delusion.
The game tringo is sort of a cross between tetris and bingo. In practice it's closer to tetris, because the shared element of play isn't all that strong.
Here is a game which is closer to bingo, but still with skill: each player selects their own hole cards, then the community cards are dealt, and the best hand wins.
With large numbers of players, this game should converge to a market equilbrium. Each player should select each possible set of hole cards with probability equal to the chances that it will be the nuts (best possible). In practice one would expect not all players to play optimally, and their bias should lead to opportunities to get ahead by playing hands which they underplay. For example, naive players are likely to overplay pair of aces, and hence split the pot among a huge number of players when that hand wins, so you could get ahead by never selecting those as hole cards. Of course, any play which assumes bias among the opponents must have bias of its own, and hence be potentially exploitable.
This game is also quite interesting with only a small number of players, but this post is about how this game works with a large number of players, so that analysis is left as an exercise to the reader.
With regular poker hands, this game is fairly homogenous and uninteresting. It would be much better to have a larger variety of possible hands, with more interesting interactions between them, and to have several community cards dealt before everyone has to pick their cards, to add to the variety. The restriction that each card can only appear once also is quite artificial in the context of this game, and should probably be eliminated. I'm open to suggestions about what a better hand structure, deck and number of community cards before and after picking might be.
Online play of this sort of game might be very quick and engaging. There could be a single large room which hundreds of people play in, and a new hand every thirty seconds, and everybody automatically puts money into the next round until they leave.
The payout structure of this sort of game is probably close to optimal for encouraging play of a gambling game. It has enough skill that in principle one could be a long term winner, but a small enough amount of available information and large enough variance that it takes a long time for 'the long run' to be likely to catch up with most players. I find this state of affairs somewhat depressing, because I personally like to play games which are designed so that the better player wins reliably, even when the skill difference is very small, because those games are the most sporting and scientific. But successful gambling games aren't about picking out who's better, they're about fostering delusion.
