Poker Texas Hold'em is now Alpha

[Crazyboog]

Sure, I added you. You should now be able to find the game and add it to your favorites. If you want to play with friends you'll need to give me their usernames so that I can add them too.

[Ne_ne12389]

Can u add me to the testers group? Thank you

[Crazyboog]

Sure, I added you

[Ludo Dave]

This is a great game to add here.

I would love to see the ability to customize a tournament/game here by

1) how many chips you start with
2) how large the big and small blinds are
3) how quickly you progress through the blind levels

This is the kind of control you can have over a game on sites where you can play poker with your buddies. By controlling these parameters, you can create a variety of games that will be greater or lesser influenced by luck or skill -- which is a great thing for beginners and old hands alike. If there is no control for setting this, you will be limiting how interested people of different poker skill will be to play it.

And if you could add me to the alpha participants group, I'd love to play, though I'm not very good yet.

[Ludo Dave]

And in regard to the "gambling" issue:

My friends and I are happier to play poker for points and bragging rights rather than money. The one table tournament format is the perfect way to accomplish this. I used to play backgammon (another ferocious gambling game, particularly in Turkey and the Middle East) with a friend where we would use the doubling cube and play matches to 11 points without ever feeling the game was pointless without money changing hands.

Bragging rights are the best stakes to play for.

[Crazyboog]

This is a great game to add here.

I would love to see the ability to customize a tournament/game here by

1) how many chips you start with
2) how large the big and small blinds are
3) how quickly you progress through the blind levels

This is the kind of control you can have over a game on sites where you can play poker with your buddies. By controlling these parameters, you can create a variety of games that will be greater or lesser influenced by luck or skill -- which is a great thing for beginners and old hands alike. If there is no control for setting this, you will be limiting how interested people of different poker skill will be to play it.

And if you could add me to the alpha participants group, I'd love to play, though I'm not very good yet.

Hi Ludo, Thanks for your inputs I added you to the testers list.

Today, you can customize the blinds increase frequency which allows, as you said, to control the "type" of poker tournament you want to do: do you want a quick 10-15minutes game (blinds increase every 2 hands) or do you want to get closer to the physical poker feeling and play for several hours (blinds increase every 10 or even 20 hands).

Now, I'm not sure about points 1) and 2) because to me, that would not add much more flexibility than being able to choose the blinds increase frequency. Don't you think? Additionally, 1) and 2) are completely redundant in the sense that it is exactly the same to start with 100 chips with blinds at 1/2 and to start with 1000 chips with blinds 10/20. So I don't think it would make sense to make both 1) and 2) customizable.

It's not a big deal anyway to make the number of starting chips customizable. So I could do it and set 100 as a default with an advice for beginners to stick to that value.

[Ludo Dave]

This is a great game to add here.

I would love to see the ability to customize a tournament/game here by

1) how many chips you start with
2) how large the big and small blinds are
3) how quickly you progress through the blind levels

This is the kind of control you can have over a game on sites where you can play poker with your buddies. By controlling these parameters, you can create a variety of games that will be greater or lesser influenced by luck or skill -- which is a great thing for beginners and old hands alike. If there is no control for setting this, you will be limiting how interested people of different poker skill will be to play it.

And if you could add me to the alpha participants group, I'd love to play, though I'm not very good yet.

Hi Ludo, Thanks for your inputs I added you to the testers list.

Today, you can customize the blinds increase frequency which allows, as you said, to control the "type" of poker tournament you want to do: do you want a quick 10-15minutes game (blinds increase every 2 hands) or do you want to get closer to the physical poker feeling and play for several hours (blinds increase every 10 or even 20 hands).

Now, I'm not sure about points 1) and 2) because to me, that would not add much more flexibility than being able to choose the blinds increase frequency. Don't you think? Additionally, 1) and 2) are completely redundant in the sense that it is exactly the same to start with 100 chips with blinds at 1/2 and to start with 1000 chips with blinds 10/20. So I don't think it would make sense to make both 1) and 2) customizable.

It's not a big deal anyway to make the number of starting chips customizable. So I could do it and set 100 as a default with an advice for beginners to stick to that value.

Thanks for adding me to the group. Hope to play some hands this weekend.

I think players need to control the ratio between starting chip amount and starting blind size because that determines how much or little luck will affect the outcome. That's because the greater the size of starting blinds in proportion to starting chip amount, the greater the chance of using up all your chips before you get a decent hand to play. The converse is also true: the smaller the size of starting blinds in proportion to starting chip amount, the more remote the chance of using up your chips before you (and your opponents) get a decent hand (or two, or three) to play. This is apart from how quickly you progress through the blind levels.

So you could accomplish this two different ways:

A) Lock in the starting chip amount. Then present an array of starting blind structures to choose from, or

B) Lock in a certain blind structure for all games (eg 10/20, 15/30, 25/50, etc.). Then let players choose how random or skillful they want their game to be by merely changing the starting chip amount. So we players see that all blinds in all games will start at, say, 10/20 -- now we can customize our experience: do we want that to be 10 percent/20 percent of our starting chips by starting with 100 chips (a more luck-saturated, bluff-fest, demolition derby of a game)? or 1 percent/2 percent by starting with 1,000 chips (a game where skill is much more likely to be rewarded)?

As players develop and improve, they will want this kind of customization to create games that reward more skillful play. And yes, being able to choose how quickly blinds progress is also a great feature for doing this.

This will be a great addition to BGA and a natural for Arena. Thank you for taking on this challenge of implementing the game.

(and I hope I'm not gassing on about what your implementation does already -- I promise to play it before making any other comments!)

[Crazyboog]

Thanks for your suggestion. I'll probably implement something like B): keep the fixed starting blinds of 1/2 and make the initial stock customizable with 100, 200, 500, 1000.

[vigorousRoll]

In my meanderings around the BGA forums the past few days, one issue I keep running into is players timing out or quitting their games and spoiling the proper statistical culmination of said contests for those participants who were still engaged in the game and wanted to see it through to completion. I winced as I thought about poker, for in the OP it states that BGA poker games will be for groups of 2 to 8 players and my preference would be to lean towards the 6 player and higher setups. But the more players you have, the more chances you have for incomplete games due to red clocks and quitting.

Then it occurred to me that poker already comes ready made with a solution and that's poker's standard practice of forced sit-outs (for tournament play). If a player times-out or quits, their hands can be folded (if they happened to be in a hand at the moment) and their stacks can be blinded down every time the SB and BB makes it around the table to them. This would allow for the contest to keep going for those still inclined to play and for a proper winner to eventually be determined.

So I offer this as a suggestion but would not at all be surprised to hear that a sit-out procedure has already been implemented.

[Crazyboog]

Hi @vigorousRoll,

Thanks for your comment. Today, there is already a logic handling players that leave the game early. Basically, they fold as soon as possible and all their chips are returned to the bank. By "as soon as possible", I mean that if the leaving player is SB or BB, he will first set place his blind and then fold when it's his turn again to bet.

I think it makes more sense like that to avoid feeding other player randomly when the blinds get high.