OK. I’m in.
How do we know where to go on Thursday?
Haj
Never mind. I just re-read the OP.
Haj
The first table is filled (as long as everyone makes it) Thurs. 10pm est.
**x-ray vision
Only Mostly Dead
hightechburrito
Lazlo
Nanook of the North Shore
wrenchslinger
Kyyrewyyoae
hajario
CapnPitt
CapnPitt** might not make it but he’s gonna let me know for sure on Wed. night. Instead of me e-mailing everyone ay 9:45 like I said in the OP, everyone just e-mail me between 9:30 and 9:45. If you’re on the above list and I don’t hear from you in that time period but I do hear from someone that wants to be an alternate, he/she will take your place. Don’t forget , at 9:58 I will e-mail you the name of the table we’re going to play at. Make sure you are clicked on “Tournaments” and “Single Table”. At exactly 10:00 ( going by this clock), we jump the table. If you know ahead of time that you’re not going to make it, please e-mail me.
Darn it. I’m gonna have to miss out. I’m driving out to Las Vegas to see Social Distortion this week. If, for some strange reason, I take my laptop and don’t have anything to do at 7pm in Las Vegas, I’ll email you. I hope not, 'cause that’ll most likely mean I’m busted out. 
I just signed up, my email is hightechburrito at yahoo. Go ahead and add me to your list.
FYI, pokerroom.com has the option of private tables, but not for tournament games. We could just agree that the buy in is a set amount of play money, and that once you are out, thats it.
I’d love to join, but 9pm EST is 3am Priceguy Time.
I just downloaded the software and when I connected and tried to set up an account I got the following error:
Status report
message /public/URLManager.action
description The requested resource (/public/URLManager.action) is not available.
Apache Tomcat/4.1
Do you think their server might be down at this early hour? Could it be I’m missing a plugin? Could it be that the world hates me?
I thought about that, but a lot of the challenge of playing tournament style is that the blinds increase as time goes on. In a regular ring game, the blinds stay the same. A ring game with blinds that don’t increase can last forever.
I’m not that computer savvy CapnPitt, so I doubt I can be of much help. How about trying to uninstall the download and start over?
Still waiting for at least one more player since Lazlo had to drop out.
I can’t seem to download the app either.
I keep getting an error screan that reads…
…play4funclient[1].exe is not a valid Win 32 application.
Huh?
wrenchslinger
I’d love to play but after going to that site and trying to download the program, my computer bogged down and is running incredibly slow now.
Tried uninstalling and reloading…same problem.
I emailed their customer support…I’ll see what happens.
I’m interested in trying things out.
As for keeping score, I’d say we use the money convention. Even though we’re playing for money, we should be able to use a SDMB thread as our accountant to track winnings and losings.
We get our first SDMB game going. Everyone has a fictional $100 buy in. The top 3 players get a share of the winnings.
1st place: $600
2nd place: $200
3rd place: $100
Then after the game, the results are posted here and running totals will be able to be totalled up but reading the history of teh thread. Plus it’ll be where all the smack talk happens. Also, using this method we don’t have to have a fixed list of players, any 9 players can get in, and they start their own fictional bankroll. The more you play, the more chances you have to build up your bank.
Also, we should be able to do a little trial and error on different game clients. I’m not sure if PartyPoker’s client allows for private play money sit and go NL games. I’ve played their and have the client at home. I’ll look into it later.
Just did a little investigating and it looks like Yahoo! games allows for private tournaments. Its a Java App so it should be platform unspecific, and we should be able to set things up with less need for coordination. I’m at work so I can’t test it out too much now, but if any one else can, please do. otherwise I’ll look into it when I get home. Any reason you didn’t look there prior to now?
I thought about doing it that way at first Omniscient, but it doesn’t keep a true record of how good a player you are because the more tournaments you’re in, the better the chance you have of having more money even though someone who has played in less games is statistically better. We don’t have to have a fixed set of players either way. Wanna try it both ways? We can keep a tally of who’s made the most money and who is statistically the best by the method I provided in post #15.
If the payoffs are:
1st place: $600
2nd place: $200
3rd place: $100
for a nine player table, we’ll have to make it:
1st place: $333.33
2nd place: $111.11
3rd place: $55.56
for a five player table.
Or am I wrong? I think I’m wrong. It seems to me that it would be alot easier to consistently make money in a five handed game than in a nine handed game. Any way to even things out? Or should we just keep tally of a players rank and forget about prize money tallies?
I tried every Poker room including Party Poker, and no one allows private tournaments for play money.
I checked out Yahoo!, but to play in tournaments there is a monthly fee for all players. I also heard that Yahoo!'s tournaments aren’t true tournaments. They’re just ring games where money gets carried over from game to game. Blinds don’t increase and there is no official winner after every game.
Let’s give play4funpoker a shot and then we can decide if there’s a better way.
Couple things. First, I’m not suggesting a Yahoo! tournament. Yes there is a fee for the premium service, but it oesn’t look like we need that. Frankly, I’m not sure what the benefit of that is for most people.
All we need a client that’ll deal and allow us to chat and play in a restricted access setting. The free version of their games allows you to create a private table, and thats all that is required. We’ll do all the “running tourney” type book keeping here in a thread.
I might have missed something there, like I said I’m at work and can’t investigate too much, but I think my thinking is sound.
As for keeping score…
I liked the money method for the exact reason you stated. IMHO the “money” is the true gauge of a better player. Sure, a normalized ranking to account for frequency of play is a better indication of raw skill (with alot of luck in there), however raw skill doesn’t feed professionals families. A really good player who plays a little and wins alot compared against a grinder who plays a ton and wins the same amount over twice as many games are equal in the eyes of the IRS and the ability to buy bling.
Plus using money to account for rankings would encourage people to play more, which in the end is a good thing. We all want to see this develop into a nice little regular thing I’m assuming. Your rating system would have the ultimate reward for a player who wins 3 games in a row and quits.
Lastly, when you’re normalizing for size of table, you could argue that your method doesn’t work. I think the goal would be to make a person coming in first worth 1 point on both scenarios and the person coming in last worth 9 points in both scenarios. Winning is winning IMHO, regardless of table size. In the end, you wouldn’t be comparing apples to apples no matter what you did though. Using money is probably the best way to compare the two types of games.
Lastly, using a faux-Cecil-bucks game plan allows us to have higher stakes games amongst the community leaders down the road. A tourney of champions of a sort.
If after 12 months we’ve accrued a ranking of 25 players, and the top 9 have $10000+ we could have a tournement of those guys with a bigger buy-in to establish a 2005 Champion. Remember, there’ll be a -$100 for every buy in, so frequency of play is already punished.
All that said, there’s no reason we couldn’t track using both methods for kicks. They would be compatible, just like there being a 1st ranked scoring defense and a different 1st ranked yardage defense in the NFL.
As for the payouts for a smaller table.
It goes like this.
1st place: Total Pot * 6/9
2nd place: Total Pot * 2/9
3rd place: Total Pot * 1/9
A 5 person table pays (rounded to the dollar for simplicity):
1st place: $333
2nd place: $111
3rd place: $56
So that was right.
I don’t think Yahoo! gives the option of playing in a restricted access setting without being a Yahoo! Games All Star member, but let us know what you find out. For now Thursday night’s 10pm est. game is still on at play4funpoker.com.
I’ll invesigate tonite and post from home about Yahoo!. Maybe I’ll check out a couple other gaming portals too for the ubiqitous poker apps. Stay tuned.