CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

Hmm.... waiting longer than I thought for another game.

Congrats on your very quick climb! I'll probably never see the top slot again on profit ratio since I started with $10. I played against you several times yesterday and in fact, against my better judgment, decided to play a $4.20 game while showing the game to a friend and lost. I'm pretty emotional with this stuff honestly, so that was kind of upsetting. However, I did win it back by the end of the night with a series of $1 games and a $3.33 game.

So you have an interesting strategy obviously and parts of it are similar to that of another poster, AnoHito. I was absolutely sure that it was Ano. Since you don't want your strategy spoiled, I will just say that to me it resembles "gambling" a lot more than my normal play style. Like literally betting a bunch of money on coin flips. Skill certainly plays a huge part in this game, but I don't buy the argument that there is no luck. At least not among mere mortals. Anyway, between the perception of coin flipping and the runaway stakes ($4.20,$6.66), I made a comparison to Martingale.

Which leads me to my final point. The best piece of advice I've received is Asminthe's Bankroll Management. Since then, I've tried to stick to ~$1 stakes and, while slow, it has produced consistent results. Don't get me wrong. $6.66 stakes are the most AWESOME stakes for this game, both thematically and because it would be the largest stakes to date (beating out $5 games IIRC). But it's also 1/3 of your current bankroll, which can be dangerous. Something to think about.

Oh interesting. This is sort of a pipe dream for me. Do elaborate!

And congrats by the way. I'm awful at coin flips.

Wait. Scratch that.

I think you've got things backwards. Betting a fixed percentage of your bankroll guarantees you won't go bust (though you could approach 0). It's Asminthe's bankrollment managment stuff: always do 5% of your bankroll as stakes.

Betting a fixed amount is likely to bankrupt you. This is very clearly demonstrated by the modified script I posted earlier.

The whole "you can always buy in again" thing is silly. Sure, if you have infinite money, gambling is no problem. But nobody does. And if your bankroll is a lot smaller than what you can comfortably afford, you're throwing away money.

We believe you. A weighted coin wins on average. Of course.

Here's the part you're missing:

If you exhaust your bankroll, you don't get to keep playing.

The above program, in fact, fails most of the time. Even if you lower the number of bets to ~1000.

In the same paragraph as talking about you all-inning on the first turn.

I agree with the sentiment though. I used to get really annoyed by people that would bet 5 on every round or all-in more often than not. I've learned that it's exploitable behavior.

Well, what I'm saying is that the reward would dwindle every turn because it's going to the house one coin at a time. And if the game goes on for a reasonable length of time, this side pot thing is completely irrelevant. It's only abnormally short games that need fixing.

I suppose someone trying that "boring contest" strategy could make every round last, what, 8 minutes? Ouch! Then again, someone who is trying not to bet anything is going to lose out to someone who is willing to bet on the first betting round (so only 2 minutes per round) and that should quickly offset any expected gains from the side pot. Who knows what people will do though!

I actually think 3 coins would be a reasonable number (if a 3% of the whole buy-in rake is acceptable). So what if you have to quit on the first round because someone is at the door? You lose 4 coins instead of 1 (you always lose 1). Doesn't seem that bad for the annoyance you are causing the other player.

I can see that, but is it any worse than the current situation in which your winnings and rake are sometimes but not always connected?

1 coin per round rake? That would drastically influence the way you bet. If no one raised, the winner wouldn't even win anything? Maybe I'm misunderstanding.

I had a similar idea. What about using this side pot for the house profit instead of a rake?

You go in contributing let's say 5 coins each and that goes into the side pot. For every round, a number of coins proportional to the round winnings (with a minimum of 1 coin) moves from the side pot to the house. The proportion is set up so that if one player is wiped out, the rest of the pot will be released to the house. In the event that a player leaves before the side pot is exhausted, the player who stayed gets the remaining amount as a reward. The side pot becomes a non-issue after 10 rounds and neither drag-out play nor the incentive to "win back" the side pot are problems.

It would thwart the leavers and the exploiters as well as making the tribute clearer. You go in knowing what you'll pay to the house instead of seeing coins fly out of your winnings seemingly at random. Even after reading the tribute thread again, it's still a bit confusing how it works.

My concern with having this side pot entirely as reward is that it will incentive all-ins too much (e.g. if I wager 90 coins, I have the potential to win 120% of that instead of 100% on any other bet).

Yea. Not only emergencies, but also having a limited block of time to play. Let's say I have 30 minutes. I can wait on a game, but what happens when the first person shows up after 25 minutes of waiting? And now I'm scrambling to win back the side pot?

Ok, I promise I'll stop after this but I hit #1 on all three. Even though the dollar balance one is probably the most meaningless leaderboard (because a wealthy player can immediately get to the top), it still trips something in my brain that says: must climb this. I think this kind of mindset actually drives a lot of success of games like LoL because you're always trying to get to a higher level, then to a higher division, etc.

I was wondering about how easily the leaderboards could be exploited and it goes back to the wire transfer concept. Want to be #1 on profit ratio? Set up two accounts. One with $20 and the other with $1. Funnel all the money from the $20 account to the $1 account and, voila, 20 X profit ratio. If you withdraw all your money, does that remove you from the boards?

It's not too important I suppose. If and when tournaments happen, I imagine those will be the most reliable way to highlight the most skilled players.

Nice! You've knocked down INSTITUTE DEED who was #1 on both the ratio and profit boards for quite a while now...

To each his own I guess!

I in fact often find the game very stressful, but obviously that's because the real money aspect makes it intense.

I've gotten the Denied error 2-3 times (emailed you once) and I'm fairly certain I've seen the [!] several times too. At least once, I tried checking the forums while this was happening and wasn't receiving a response there. I'll try to keep a closer eye on it.