I’m learning to play bridge this year, and finding one of the best features of the game is the duplicate scoring. Simply put, you compete in a bridge tournament with the same set of cards as your competitors - each hand is duplicated at each table. This has a profound effect on the game, strategy, scoring, playing, the lot - you could lose every hand you played and still win the tournament, for example. It also dramatically reduces luck and chance in the game - it really does all come down to the skill of the card-playing partnership.
Is a similar set-up possible in Texas holdem poker? A quick google shows that it is well-established as a concept (link ), but doesn’t sound like it is a common way of playing. What do the poker cognoscenti make of it? Does it work and does it add anything to the game? (other than circumventing gambling legislature)
I see no reason why it wouldn’t be possible, particularly online. But I don’t see any push to make it happen, and I don’t want it to happen.
Poker is a gambling game, so people don’t necessarily want to remove luck and variance from the equation. If there was less luck involved, bad players would lose their money much quicker and in a more linear fashion. Then they’d realize much faster that they’re losing players and quit playing. Then there’s no one for the good players to make money from. So as a good player, I have to say that I don’t like this idea.
as I understand the analogy to duplicate bridge, since every poker player at a table is ‘in it for themselves’, then you’d need to make sure that there are an appropriate number of players total to make sure that each team has an opportunity to play each hand at each table.
Multiples of 16 or 25 seem to make the most sense. (For 4 or 5 people per table respectively.) For a 16 player duplicate poker tourney for instance, you’d have team A getting dealt to first at table 1, dealt to second at table 2, dealt the third hand at table 3, and dealing at table 4.
You’d probably want to make sure that minor variations in play would change the cards going to each player as little as possible, which would rule out draw variations, and for any versions where cards are continually dealt after the biddings starts, (such as typical stud or seven-card stud,) you might want to continue dealing to the folded players, simply so that the later cards aren’t switched around just because of whether one guy folded early or not.
Texas holdem is more like the draw style, right? With ‘common cards’ in the middle that everybody who stays in can use? It might be interesting to see how the typical poker elements of bluff and working the probabilities work in a duplicate environment. Probably everybody is going to play somewhat ‘conservatively.’ - if you have a 38% chance of winning double what you bet by staying in, then that’s going to be less attractive than in regular play I think, unless you really need those points to help push your team up the leaderboard. (Because if you bet and lose, all the competing teams who played it safe will get a comparative advantage against you.)
Hold 'em is a variant of stud. In draw games, players can discard and replace cards from their hands. In stud games you play what you’re dealt (and with hold 'em everyone is “dealt” the common cards). I would be interested in trying some duplicate poker, although I wouldn’t be willing to play any poker variant in which the cards weren’t unchanging regardless of any action. So that rules out anything without common cards (leaving hold 'em or Omaha) for me. I wonder about chip stacks, though. If everyone starts out with the same amount on every board that takes all the elements associated with stack sizes out of the equation.
Try to describe just what you want to do to keep it fair, and you might see what the problem is.
Everyone gets the same hand against the other same hands?
For each of those hands, how many flops are you going to see? You going to deal out flops so that every hand is a potential winner?
Keep in mind that one plays poker differently depending on the characteristics of the players in front of and behind that player, so you’d really want to permute the positions of the players for each distribution of cards.
In addition to playing differently based on how your opponents are seated, you play differently based on where you are in relation to the blinds. So, you’d want to deal the same hands with the blinds rotated.
For even a 5 person table, you might need to play 1000 flops with one set of hole cards to ensure that everyone saw a “balanced” scenario.
I don’t know enough about bridge, but I imagine it’s easier to immediately exploit poor play in single hands. In poker, you might have AJ in late position. If there are two raises before it gets to you, a reasonable play is to flop. If there are all folds, a reasonable play is to raise. You don’t know the right answer until the board is out. In bridge, if East comes out with “13 hearts”, there’s a way to kill that.
I think I see what the OP is saying. Due to betting and individual playing styles, you could have the exact same hands at two different tables and get wildly different results. Do this over 10 hands say and see what the results are . . .
but what happens when people start getting knocked out? You lose the duplicate aspect unless you keep the same number of people at each table.
I’m thinking you’d have to get very specific on a per-hand basis as to how many chips each player has. Chips would not carry over from one “board” to the next.
You would have to isolate the tables pretty well. If the next table over has one guy disgustedly cursing, and another guy is celebrating wildly, I’m gonna wonder if it was crap pulled on the river, and adjust my play accordingly
To deal with individual players going out at different tables at different times, you could deal dead hands to the empty chairs. I think a better way would be to eliminate the lowest chips stack at each table when someone goes out at any table. Cruel, I know, but this wouldn’t be your average poker tournament.
Good point about isolation, wolfman.
That would still not be true duplicate because the players playing those dead hands at other tables would be live, affecting the outcome. I’ve thought about this before, mainly because I LOVE bridge and I HATE texas holdem. OK maybe I don’t hate it, but I hate how a game that requires as little skill as holdem became a multibillion dollar industry. And yes I understand that the reason it became so big is because it is so simple. But I sure would like to see bridge, which is an amazing game that I think everyone should play, get the same kind of push.
As for the OP, the only way I could see this working is if you reset everyone to even $ after every hand, and just tally up the results separately as you go along.
Yeah, by calling the tournament director. “13 hearts” is not a legitimate bid. The highest number a bid can hit is seven. The number in a bid represents the number of tricks above six your team is committing to take, so “1 heart” means you believe you can take seven tricks with hearts as trump.
Of course with the ridiculously complex bidding systems that some bridge players use, “1 heart” rarely means “1 heart” anymore. It means, if you’re the one making it before anyone else bids, something more like “I have 13-15 high card points (12-14 in some systems) and at least five hearts.” Or if it’s over your partner’s bid of either one club or one diamond, it means you have four hearts instead of five and may have as few as ten HCP.
Which is why I like poker better than bridge. Poker is less mechanical.
As a huge fan of both hold’em and bridge, I have to emphatically disagree with both of the above two posts. Bridge isn’t called the king of card games for nothing, and a less mechanical card game I’ve yet to meet. It takes great skill to assess the many facets of your hand and communicate as effectively as you can, over potential opponent interference, in a language that is restricted to fewer than a dozen words. Well-played bridge is as beautiful as well-played chess, and bridge is a great social game as well.
As for hold’em requiring no skill, I invite you to sit at some high stakes tables online against players like ADZ124, Genius28, Rekrul, or CTS and not lose your shirt, your house, and your firstborn. Hold’em is simple in that the rules are easy to learn, but that’s never stopped a game from having great depth. Do I think hold’em is as deep a game as bridge, strategically? No. But it’s a lot closer than people think.
ETA: As for duplicate hold’em, I think it would work pretty well as a cash game setup (no increasing blinds, no players getting knocked out), and with each hand everyone resets to the initial buyin. How much was won or lost on each hand as a running total would be each player’s score.
a player getting knocked out shouldn’t be a problem. When one player 7 gets knocked out, all player 7s have their chipstacks recorded and reset.
My question is, is the seed game designed, or does the tournament director deal a bunch of hands, flops, turns, etc and record them, and later deal the same hands/flops/turns.
I didnt say no skill, I said little, and compared to bridge I think that’s accurate. I can take a person who is familiar with card games and teach him some basic holdem strategy in a couple hours and he will able to beat a pro heads up 30-40% of the time. Theres no WAY you could do the same with bridge. 2 cards just makes for too small a decision tree.
I’m gonna have to call BS on this one. He’ll be able to beat a pro maybe one time in twenty, and even that’s doubtful. The reason the top pros don’t win the WSoP anymore isn’t because Hold’em isn’t a deep, strategic game; it’s because when there are thousands of players, one in twenty isn’t that rare.
The no-limit holdem section of Brunson’s Super System can be read in an afternoon. That alone will make someone who understands cards in a general sense into an adequate holdem poker player. I stand by my previous statement - holdem is a very simple game with a much smaller decision tree than bridge.
Yes and no. You hold JT of hearts and the flop is Js 8h 7d. Pot is $500 and there are two others in the pot with you out of position. Based on previous experience, a bet of $500 or less will probably keep both players in if they have ANYTHING and a bet of $1000 will drive off the player(s) unless they have a great hand.
Oh, by the way - the third to act loves to pounce on weak play so you know it would go check-check-big bet, but that depends on #2 checking.
What is going to constitute a “win” in your scenario? Winning a hand? Busting your opponent? Having more chips after a certain amount of time?
Hell, you could play it blind, all-in every hand and probably win 30% of your matches . People don’t realize even 72 is going to knock of AK 30% of the time. Normally the favorite is not even going to be THAT GOOD. Your average hand would probably end up T6 vs. K5s or something (40/60).
The problem is that only winning 30% of the time is getting DESTROYED. The house advantage in Blackjack usually doesn’t rise much above 0.6% and look what happened to Las Vegas.
If someone calls a pot sized bet here I’m not happy with JT. With no flush what draw could they be on that they’d call a pot sized bet? :eek: More likely I think you’re looking at a made hand, or at the very least a better jack.
Well, it would certainly be possible to create a “duplicate” poker game but what would be the point? The only motivation for playing poker is to win money (sure psychological elements are present but winning money is the purpose of the game.) The purpose of playing bridge is the competition itself, winning is nice, but just competing is fun, even if you are not really of the highest caliber. In bridge everyone has a chance to win, luck really is a major factor in the short run, but it is the competition that makes it, not the prizes. (If you don’t think luck is a factor, just wait until your excellent bidding gets you to a slam where everyone else stopped at game, and you (and everyone else) make your 11 tricks because of a 4-0 trump split for a cold bottom. That is bad luck.)
