CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

Would be kind of interesting to rake the buy-in and display a prize for the winner based on a percentage of whats been raked from entries so far. Kind of like a progressive jackpot.

The point of penalizing people for leaving is to punish abusers who leave constantly after getting a bad first number. What happens is because of the anonymity of the game, I can't avoid playing with a player who is abusing that system. Right now I can avoid the games they create to a small extent by avoiding that stake amount when there is only a couple players online. There's nothing stopping someone from constantly joining my games, getting a bad number, then leaving. What good reason is there for providing barely any downside to this?

I was simply proposing an additional coin penalty if someone leaves after picking a single number but before betting. As it stands right now, someone can leave at that point and only lose their 1 coin ante. If a player lost an additional coin, that's trivial to someone who has to leave a game due to real world issues, but doubles the cost for someone abusing the system. Ideally in a non-tournament setting, the penalty would only apply for leaving after picking your first number. That means no penalty (except the usual 1 coin ante) for leaving a game just after a round ends which should solve your issue of drag on games (a single round can only last X minutes max because of timeouts).

Lots of interesting options. I have definitely had games where I end up with less than 20 coins left which I feel leaves me with very little betting influence and I usually leave at that point to reset back to 100. Not sure how I'd feel about being pressured to stay in to bust by a side pot punishment.

Something I think could help focus this discussion is some actual benchmark goals for how often players should be folding, when they should be leaving, etc so that the design has some specific goals.

Right now I feel like a player should (real life intrusions aside) play at least 3 rounds (even if they simply fold all 3 on first round) before leaving a game.

Awesome, that will work. Thanks!

I could list a few specific tricks/strategies that have been pretty successful, but without knowing the actual skill level or common strategies of your specific opponent its hard to get anywhere near perfect. I wouldn't mind discussing strategy, but with so few players right now I kinda worry that they would be used against me...although that could work to my advantage too...

Maybe ill start up a thread about some and see where it goes.

Yeah that punk had a good lead on me till someone went all in on a $0.77 game. Kept that recording hehe.

Awww I like the profit ratio one because I'm the top player on it lol. It's the only leaderboard I'm good at. I started playing with $1.55 and am up to around $3.60!

I definitely wasnt suggesting not having a reveal and final bet. I totally agree that its important. The way its currently setup though, the amount of misinformation you can use in the reveal is minimal and often will wipe out previous betting bluffing.

Let's say for example holdem did something similar and had a final round after all 5 community cards were out where you revealed one of your hole cards and did a final round of betting. Yes, sometimes the card you could reveal could reinforce a bluff, but more often than not, it would reveal you as a liar and you'd be better off just folding.

If you want to encourage more folding than I suppose thats fine. I feel like with the game being one on one and so much changing of opponents that it's better that rounds play out until the end more often.

It seems like a lot of design debate stops at "if you're sufficiently advanced then that's not an issue" which leaves the middle skill level between novice and advanced pretty uninteresting. I think part of pokers appeal is that it supports that midrange really well outside of tournaments. The midrange player only half knows what he's doing and having some flexibility to go for hail mary moves when he's screwed up is imo one of the things that stops it from being a constant foldfest.

Right now the reveal is essential but gives too useful of information and doesn't leave enough room for misinformation outside of betting. The realtime possibilities graph is super awesome for making the game more accesible but has the downside of weakening bluffing compared to poker.

I think all it will take is one additional bit of misdirection under player control (such as some of the suggestions made so far) to make bluffing really shine.

I agree it's not usually truly 50/50, my points were more about the feel than actual statistics.

The situations I mentioned are kind of a mix of fake choices and an overall sense of resigning to fate. While I know Pandante is not typically played for cash, I do really appreciate some of the dynamics Sirlin was trying to better encourage. One of those is the feeling that you can always potentially bluff hail mary your way out of bad situations. While CM doesn't provide perfect information, it does narrow down heavily towards the end, leaving you feeling more and more boxed into a bad situation.

I felt like having a 3rd possibility during the final rounds feels much more dynamic than the 2 "50/50" options. While I really like the ability to choose which number to reveal, I find that I'm often not given good options to choose from. This leaves me unable to do much to influence my bluff, especially if I can't even "reveal" any numbers above theirs.

Being able to choose my bet sizes throughout the match gives me some flexibility in bluffing, but because my coins are always capped to 100, my ability to exercise that flexibility reduces throughout the match. To me poker feels like I often can either fold on my starting hand (which isn't great in a 1 on 1 game, especially one with a fixed amount of chips) or I can find some way to salvage a hand through bluffing. Due to the anonymity of the game and lack of any social dynamics, I have very few avenues to exercise bluffing saves.

It doesn't have to be direct manipulation of the ticks, but I feel like the game really does need a little more opportunity to manipulate the information your opponent receives as right now its extremely focused on bet #'s. It could even be as simple as one of your column choices not affecting the narrowing down of ticks that your opponent sees, allowing you to mask a good/bad choice. I also think your suggestion about revealing a square you didn't pick could be interesting, although I'm not sure how feasible that can be done without it being obvious. I found when playing online poker with no chat or social dynamics, it becomes very focused on bet amounts just like CM and ends up pretty much in super conservative play, folding any hands that aren't strong. It can still be ok to an extent in online poker because it has multiple players with easy drop in/out and non-fixed chip stacks.

I played quite a few games against a player this morning who would run a $0.25 game and anytime he didn't like his starting # he would simply leave the game. It was really boring to play this guy (and due to the lack of players I didn't have many other choices) other than to know I was able to give him bad starting numbers the majority of the time. In thinking about what can be done about this kind of play, obviously an inability to fold on first bet wouldn't prevent someone from leaving the game. I understand your reasons for wanting to allowing leaving whenever with the penalty of losing the pot, but 1 coin is often a meaningless penalty and of no benefit to me for having to put up with it. I can't choose who I play against other than by recognizing his stake (which will become more useless as more players join) to make sure to avoid this player. I think a simple solution is to increase the penalty for leaving a game super early to an additional coin or more. One additional coin doesn't seem like a huge penalty, especially for those who have to leave due to real life reasons, but doubles the cost for someone doing this excessively. This penalty only need apply to leaving, as folding instead applies a different kind of penalty in that they reduce their stack size and grow mine so I benefit from sticking around.

Why allow folding on the first bet? I like how Pandante (Dave Sirlin's take on poker) prevents you from folding too early to encourage you to bluff more and salvage a bad start. That game has a lot more ways to increase your chances late game, but many still related to bluffing. I have salvaged and won even some CM games where my first # was a 1. If someone is going to fold on me all the time I'd want to get at least 2 coins from them.

I saw red exclamations off and on quite a bit throughout my play time, usually lasting about 10 seconds or so. Knowing my setup here at home and the actual internet usage during the time I was playing, I don't see any reason why there would have been any trouble communicating to your server on my end. Not ruling that out as a possibility of course. Would be nice if there was a way to verify what was causing the issue. Hopefully I didn't lose out on any money from the timeouts, especially because of the rake

I think CONNECTION LOST or even CONNECTION TIMEOUT are better for being clear on what happened. DENIED BY SERVER makes it sound like i'm falling victim to some kind of misdirected anti-cheating algorithm.