The other card game
I played some bridge last night for the first time in ages, and was pleased to find that I wasn't too rusty. I did have to fight the urge to lay out my hand as if playing Chinese Poker though ... hey perhaps there's a good combination game there, first play a hand of bridge and then use the same cards for Chinese Poker.
Weird as it might seem, I actually think that "duplicate poker" could work too. A pure version would have two teams of two players, playing two heads up matches. Each match would get the same hole cards/flops etc. but the teammates would be in opposite seats. A less pure version, intended more to provide food for analysis by onlookers would simply have a MTT where the cards at each table were duplicated.
I just realised that the casual reader may not know about the duplicate principle by which almost all competitive bridge is played. Briefly, the idea is that the entrants (either pairs or teams of four) play the same hands as their competitors (i.e. the hands are "duplicated"). Rather than scoring up by total points, your results are compared to those of your competitors who were playing the same cards as you. This doesn't entirely eliminate the luck factor as of course you have different opponents on those hands, but it goes a long way towards eliminating the "luck of the deal".
I had been planning a long post about transferable skills between bridge and poker, until I realised that there don't seem to be any. I know that's not really true, since reading tells is certainly important in bridge (not as much as in poker, but important none the less), but as my poker play is entirely online that doesn't count.
You need to know and understand some probabilities in bridge, but most people get by with general guidelines. These are most interesting when spectacularly misapplied. Of course card memory is very important in bridge, and also important in stud style games. But, I've never been able to link the two. The systems or structures that I use to remember cards in bridge have a lot to do with integrating information about the entire hand, and simply don't translate into "the following cards are dead". If I plan to take up stud games seriously, I'll need to work on that aspect of the game.
Anyhow, we won, and, more or less as you'd expect in a 20 player bridge event, the reward was a $1 lottery ticket. Each!
Weird as it might seem, I actually think that "duplicate poker" could work too. A pure version would have two teams of two players, playing two heads up matches. Each match would get the same hole cards/flops etc. but the teammates would be in opposite seats. A less pure version, intended more to provide food for analysis by onlookers would simply have a MTT where the cards at each table were duplicated.
I just realised that the casual reader may not know about the duplicate principle by which almost all competitive bridge is played. Briefly, the idea is that the entrants (either pairs or teams of four) play the same hands as their competitors (i.e. the hands are "duplicated"). Rather than scoring up by total points, your results are compared to those of your competitors who were playing the same cards as you. This doesn't entirely eliminate the luck factor as of course you have different opponents on those hands, but it goes a long way towards eliminating the "luck of the deal".
I had been planning a long post about transferable skills between bridge and poker, until I realised that there don't seem to be any. I know that's not really true, since reading tells is certainly important in bridge (not as much as in poker, but important none the less), but as my poker play is entirely online that doesn't count.
You need to know and understand some probabilities in bridge, but most people get by with general guidelines. These are most interesting when spectacularly misapplied. Of course card memory is very important in bridge, and also important in stud style games. But, I've never been able to link the two. The systems or structures that I use to remember cards in bridge have a lot to do with integrating information about the entire hand, and simply don't translate into "the following cards are dead". If I plan to take up stud games seriously, I'll need to work on that aspect of the game.
Anyhow, we won, and, more or less as you'd expect in a 20 player bridge event, the reward was a $1 lottery ticket. Each!
Labels: random observations
posted by Michael Albert at 8:34 am
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