How about a team tournament?
This gives each player a motive to do well compared to other players with his cards, as opposed to only other players at his table.
Get 6 teams (as 6 players seems a reasonable number for a single table).
Put one player from each team in a different position at each table.
The cards and dealer are identical at each table.
I think this would work, at least up to where a player got eliminated. At that point the situation is not identical at all tables…
There was a recent human vs. computer poker tournament run in this fashion. Two humans in different rooms playing against computers. The same hands were dealt in each room, but to opposite players. The humans narrowly won.
IIRC that was limit hold’em they were playing, which computers have a much easier time with than no limit.
I remember discussion of an online site running duplicate tournaments, no idea how it went, but it’s been tried.
I don’t think it would serve the purpose that people think it would - removing the random factor and leaving only skill.
Hold 'em is not a mechanical game where there’s a concrete correct move to make with certain cards. It may be correct to play one hand at one table, because of the tendencies and actions of your opponents, and yet not correct to play the exact same hand in the same position at another table. If this is a tournament setting, the number of chips each player has can dramatically alter proper strategy, so that a few hands in, even though two duplicate players are playing with the same cards, they aren’t playing the same situations. And different people being eliminated would significantly affect play.
If you took it out of a tournament setting, and hit a reset switch at the end of every hand as far as chips (or played limit hold’em with an infinite bankroll for each player), and then recorded the results over many hands (at least thousands) you might start to accomplish what you set out to do - but it still wouldn’t be some objective arbiter of skill, because the strengths and weaknesses of different players would dictate different play with the same cards.
But… people wouldn’t want to play that sterile, long term thing. They’d want a tournament. And then what you’ve got isn’t that much more demonstrative of skill than a regular tournament, if at all.
I disagree. I’ve never played bridge, so I can’t compare, but to say that someone could be an “adequate” player after reading a chapter in a book is absurd. I don’t know your level of experience, but I would guess that you don’t fully understand what’s involved in the decision trees for hold 'em. The game is mechanically simple, of course. Which is why it’s suitable for TV and brings in lots of bad players - it seems far simpler than it is.
When you propose your heads up scenario in which someone barely familiar with the game can beat a pro heads up 30-40% of the time, what are you envisioning? If you make a crapshooty structure - tournament structure, no limit, each player starts with 10 big bets, blinds escalate, then yes, that might be true. But if you set up a reasonable structure, say, freezeout, fixed blinds, limit, 200 BBs per player, your amateur will most likely win less than 5% of the time.
If a lot of your knowledge about hold 'em comes from TV, I can understand where you might think this. They deliberately pick the most crapshooty stage of the most crapshooty events to cover, and then disprortionately show the least interesting hands.* Final tables on tournaments where the structure is absurdly designed to give each player 10-15BBs makes for extremely simple and random poker.
Who watches poker on TV, I honestly don’t know. The coverage is clearly not meant to cater to knowledgable poker players - they only cover the most boring, simple, random poker they can. So the people who watch poker on TV don’t know poker. So why are they watching? Do they just like to see chips move around, big numbers called out, and showdowns dealt dramatically? Would people watch a rich person play a $1000 slot machine for the same reason? I don’t know.
My experience is that I’ve played both games for >15 years, and I’ve also designed AIs for a texas holdem cellphone game that had to have 10 different difficulty levels. My top rated AI was good enough to beat most of the testers regularly (not an easy task considering the limited processing power of cellphones). And my statement is not absurd at all. In fact I’ve heard stories of people doing just that - their friend taught them to play right before a tourney and they came in and won. IIRC thats how Annie Duke got started.
Trust me - play some bridge & it will immediately be obvious how much more challenging the game is. It takes an average person about a month just to get the basic mechanics of the game. It takes much longer to even qualify as an intermediate player. I’ve been playing competetively for almost 10 years and I am still in the bottom division.
Hmm. I think I resent this. I know poker, I think I’m a decent player (others on the board disagree, but oh well) and I enjoy watching poker on TV. I like the drama and I think I’ve learned some things about how to play. One could ask the same question about anything on television, especially sports.
There’s a syndicated show, The Ultimate Poker Challenge, which has recently changed from covering tournaments to cash games. It’s low stakes NL, $75-$150 blinds IIRC.
Maybe you’re just not very good at bridge.
Let’s play & find out! 
That’s low stakes?! How many games with blinds >75-150 are regularly spread worldwide? Maybe a dozen? 75-150 NL is very high stakes imo.
I can’t compare bridge to hold 'em, I can only evaluate your assessment of hold 'em. It’s not a game in which a player can be expected to play “adequately” after a few hours of instruction, but I suppose you’d have to define adequately. Certainly they would most likely not be a break-even player at that point, even at the competition you find at $3/$6 level live games.
What’s your hypothetical situation in which a new person to the game beats a professional 30-40% of the time? The structure of the game significantly affects the random element and how much a skill difference will show. A limit freezeout structure in which each player has a total of one blind is pure luck - there’s no skill involved. A structure in which there are 10 big bets has a small amount of leeway where superior play can manifest, but is very random. A structure in which each player has 1000 big bets would practically never result in the new player winning.
I’m mostly irritated with the networks choice of how they cover/edit events, rather than people who watch it. I didn’t mean to be quite so insulting.
But at least in sports, you see the whole event. Everything that happened is there for you to evaluate, except the stuff that’s off camera like, in football, receivers running routes away from the ball. But in poker, most of the good stuff happens “off camera”.
For example, let’s say there’s a beautifully executed 90 yard drive in football. The offense executes well designed screens, pulls, and traps. Beautiful circus catches. And you pretty much see all of it.
But if it were the poker TV coverage of that same drive, what you’d see is the offense lining up at the 1 yard line after executing that beautiful drive (without showing the rest of the great drive), then show the team lined up in the huddle, drawing out the suspense, and then finally showing the routine 1 yard run. They miss all the good stuff, by spending all their time on the suspense and the “big” stuff - in this analogy, the big, but probably uninteresting pots, are covering the routine, but scoring, play.
But not only that, late-stage crapshooty tournament poker is probably the most boring form of poker. Piles of chips move around, and lots of money is won, but the poker is simple and easy. ESPN/WPT/etc and I guess their viewers like to see situations where there’s dramatic card dealing. There’s nothing at all interesting about a hand where we have 77 vs AQ all in preflop because each player only had 5 big blinds and they have no choice in the matter - but ESPN/WPT/etc seems to think this is the ideal televised poker hand, spending 20 minutes per hour dramatically showing cards being dealt in this situation.
It doesn’t matter what format you pick, when you are playing no limit theres no defense against pushing with marginal hands and getting lucky draws.
How bout the WSOP, which has been won by amateurs for the last 5 years? Obviously these amateurs have logged a lot of playing time, but still, you will never see anything equivilent in Bridge.
That adds some higher degree of randomness, but a very deep stacked NL game (in a freezeout situation) very dramatically favors the better player.
Sure, if you trap a guy down in a pot for all his money when you’ve got 85% pot equity, and he pulls out that 15%, there’s nothing you can do. But in a deep stack structure, you face that situation less, you have more control over when to pick your spots and be able to whittle them down. And even still, that’s no 30-40%.
The word “professional” in poker TV terms is distorted. “Professional” seems to mean “someone you’ve seen on TV before”… I played poker professionally for a few years, and I was quite good at it, and if I won the WSOP they’d probably be calling me an “unknown amateur”.
So yes, in a tournament of thousands of people, when you might acknowledge 100 of them as “professionals”, it’s very likely that an amateur should win. That doesn’t mean that poker is easy, or is all just a big roll of the dice. But single tournaments aren’t the long term. I’m not saying that poker doesn’t have a short term random element.
It’s unlikely in the extreme that someone with 4 hours of poker instruction could take down the world series main event, even if it’s not likely that the best player of a 5000 player tournament will win.
HoboStew, the explosion of texas holdem in recent years can only be good for bridge - it’s put card games back into the public eye. Hold’em is close to overtaking golf as the ubiquitous leisure subject you really hope people won’t start talking about in the alehouse. I probably took up bridge for this reason.
Lord knows, the grand old game of contract bridge needs help. I don’t know what things are like near you - but the average age at my club must be 60, easy. The club is in a three-story tenement flat and it has one of those chairlifts for the stairs. The thing is up and down like a yo-yo all night.
In Tanah Hirsch’s Bridge column yesterday she documented a trial for the Bermuda Bowl in which Joe Grue and Curtis Cheek went to grand slam with a 5-0 trump split, and they made it (by forcing overruffs). All the other tables stopped at small slam, making only 12, and giving Grue and Cheek 11 IMPs. So, yes, the split was bad luck, but everyone had the exact same bad luck, and one player figured out how to play it better than the rest. In duplicate poker there would still be more variables in luck depending on what others do.
Does it really “remove luck and variance?” I’m not an expert player, but I don’t see that.
As I understand it, the deck is shuffled randomly, thus giving you your normasl luck and variance. Its just that the same random order of cards is given to each table. You have your hand, randomly selected, and the community cards, randomly selected and you play what you are dealt.
But there is someone else on another table who has been given exactly the same hand as yours, playing agfainst opponents with the same hands as your opponents. He may do better or worse than you, with the same hand. Which may be a better indication of your skills than facing each other directly.
As far as I can see, whether you are the only person playing the hand you get, or if there are 100 other people playing the hand you get, should not make a difference. Or maybe I’mn missing something.
Of course, it could not be done online, people at different tables might exchange information.
I think you’re missing that the scoring would be done based on how you did relative to those other players, rather than how you did at the poker table.
But no, it doesn’t remove “luck and variance” completely and it’s hard to say how much. See my first post for various flaws.