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I just released v26, which does nothing beyond remove the experimental suited game as an option.
Oh, you must mean:
FREE WILL and random numbers are both ILLUSIONS caused by an individual human's FAILURE to understand the UNIVERSE.
Yeah, I agree that the guy being interviewed sounded like he was peddling a flop there. That's never going to work, and no casino is going to fall for it.
The only successful "skill gaming" things that I'm aware of always involve other players. For anyone interested in this area, I highly recommend checking out King's stalwart endeavor here:
It's worth putting money into. The experience is really good. You will win money for a while until the matchmaking catches up to you. Yep, this is what they did before Candy Crush.
Oh, unless you want to count carnival games and Chuck-E-Cheese. I love these machines, for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLwIOk-0jpc
I think the trick here is that they are SO HARD that really, no one stands a chance. So hard that they are effectively ruled by chaos in the end. Angry Birds may be like this (quite a bit like Skeeball or bowling). But Gamblit's other two examples look like slow strategy games.
With the coin game, the incremental investment (just another quarter!) can hold the promise of a gigantic potential payout (look at all those quarters that are just about to fall). And the presentation is kind of deceptive, because the coins hanging off the edge have a pretty robust structure (overlapping scales supporting each other).
Still, I can't see casinos moving toward quarter-pushing games...
Also, since these things are legal everywhere, why would you want to go to a casino to play them? Same goes for Royal-style "skill contests," etc.
Well, after 20+ hours of live poker, with a max of $600 on the line (the buy-in was $300, and I had to re-buy one time), I walked away with $617.
Day 1 I walked away short ($517 after the two buy-ins).
Day 2, I played much better. I sat down with $300 and walked away with $400.
My bank roll for the trip was $2000.
Your friend's story is accurate. Even with expert level play, you should not play with your whole bankroll. For example, if you hold AA, you need to get half the table to fold pre-flop before you have a >50% chance of winning the hand (thus, "slow playing" the AA preflop is a bad move). At that point, math says you should get as much of your money in the pot as you can (getting another player, or more than one, all-in is the best you can do). Still, even though long-run math is on your side here, you will lose 43% of the time. Thus, you need a long-run bankroll to back you up. That's where the 5% max rule comes from. If you sit down with the whole thing, you are much more likely to go broke.
Note that even if you get everyone but one person to fold when you hold AA, you will still lose 14% of the time.
This is interesting to play with:
http://www.pokernews.com/poker-tools/po … ulator.htm
Note that vs. AA, KK is just as bad as 22.
Best story:
Day 2, I sit down at a table full of strangers. My max buy-in is $300. I get dealt my first hand, and it's KK. I raise, one guy re-raises, everyone else folds, I re-raise back, he goes all-in with a $600 stack. I call him for $300. (He probably just thought I was trying to establish an aggressive image on my first hand, or that I was a fool... who knows.)
Flop comes 6QK. "Sorry man!" and I show my kings. The look on his face as he pushes me a stack of $300 and I instantly double-up to become the big stack at the table.
I never saw his cards, so I don't know what he had. But he said something like, "I wouldn't have gone all-in if you had a larger stack." Which means he didn't have AA, and we know he didn't have KK. What did he have? AK? QQ maybe? Or maybe something even worse.
My mistake was that I didn't get him to show first. I think because he went all-in first and I called him, he was the one who had to show first, but it may vary by card room. I missed a chance to learn something about that player.
Well, you'd better have GI contact me again if GI really doesn't want a prize. I don't remember that email.
Anyone with iOS wanna try some of these games and report back?
https://gamblitgaming.com/games/
I'm wondering if they have the real money part in place in the AppStore version... Looks like it.
The rating is 17+ for:
Gambling and Contests
Frequent/Intense Simulated Gambling
Cobblestone, I don't remember hearing that from Garments Infection...
I'll be contacting everyone officially by email soon to find out how they want to handle multi-wins.
Yeah, after testing this suited version a bunch, I don't think it adds much beyond novelty. It didn't really add any kind of missing drama. The same play pattern of knowing what your opponent's possibilities are is there. In standard, you block them from getting high numbers on later turns based on the number you think they got on earlier turns. In suited, you block them from getting matching suits and values in later turns based on the likely suits and values they got in earlier turns. Yeah, you don't need the score graph as much, because our brains are good at pattern matching, but so what? The score graph was a really cool part of CM. I've never met anyone who didn't say, "Whoa, cool!" when they learned about how the score graph worked.
There are bigger problems with CM (2-player only, parity problem, etc.) that this new mode does not solve at all.
So, in the end, I'm going back to the idea that "truly novel" games are really important to me as a designer. CM is brand new in every conceivable way, and that's a really important point. It may not appeal to this or that audience because of that, but so be it. I've always stuck by the idea that a really amazing design that never takes off in a big way is much better than a less interesting, pandering design that becomes a hit.
Poker may be a better game than this, but that doesn't mean that this game should change to be more like Poker.
Also, after 20 hours of Poker in Vegas.... it was one of the most amazing gaming experiences of my life. I'd highly recommend it to anyone who is looking to play one of the most amazing games ever invented....
Glad you all liked it so much!
I just got back from Vegas and am recovering from 20 hours of live poker over 2 days (and many interesting conversations with pros, etc., about CM).
I'll be doing the prize sorting stuff in earnest very soon. Thanks for standing by.
Cobblestone, I set up a local server for playing around and might be able to help you set one up. In particular Jason hasn't updated the database initialisation for recent changes, so it's necessary to run 3 of the scripts in databaseUpdates (gameType.txt, expGameStats.txt, gameLedgerTimeIndex.txt)
I just looked in the source for server.php and I don't think this is true. The CREATE statements DO have those changes in place...
I realize that I forgot to update the foyer.php links to the v25 bundles. So maybe that's what you ran into?
If you've noticed something I've failed to notice, please email me about it so I can fix it.
You can also contact me directly and we can work out a way for you to send an international wire or check by mail, etc. There are other ways besides credit cards, but they are not automatic:
jasonrohrer@fastmail.fm
Those are just throw-away suits that I drew quickly in GIMP, and I simply subtracted the existing 1-9 sprites from them (so the identical 9 shape repeats 4 times, each one is not hand drawn). Just trying to get it going as quick and dirty as possible. If I decided to keep it, I'd hand draw all 36 combos somehow, and likely devise better looking suits.
But I would hope to stick with an occult aesthetic for the suits.
Yeah, it's true that shared cards can be generated randomly... though it could be then argued that the grid would then favor one player too much, at random. I dunno...
Just watched my 12-y-old wipe someone out with close to a sure-thing flush on pick 3 (3/4 chance of hitting), which he hit as a 5-high flush. The opponent could have hit a 9-high flush, though, so it was scary. After reveal, it was clear that the opponent didn't have the flush. At showdown, the opponent had a 7-high straight.
What a sweet sight those 3 little green leaves were at the end...
Love those suit names!
Yeah, the first pick is especially meaningless, it seems. My kid is playing right now, and my advice to him is to pick the col with the most variety for himself and the col with the least variety for the opponent. For example, if you give the opponent the col with four 5's in it, there's no chance for them to pair or triple. If you give them the col with lots of one suit in it, there's less chance for them to flush.
And if they learn that you're doing that, well... they've got you beat, I think.
After third pick, it's pretty easy for me to quickly look through their possible squares and detect pairs, straights, flushes, etc. Also to detect the case where they have none of these.
Long time no see, Zed!
I agree that 9*4 and the relation to poker hands is boring. This is just a first experiment on this concept. Does non-monotonicity of hands make this more interesting?
In my initial plays of the experimental mode, I don't think that it does. Maybe its slightly more interesting, because it engages the pattern-matching brain more than the number one does (you can look after pick 3 and easily see that they have a potential flush... you can look before pick 3 and see that you can force either a straight or a flush for sure... wowee!)
But I find that I'm pretty much playing this the same way as I played the other game. There's a chance my opponent has a better hand than me, or I know that I've won, etc, after pick 3.
What's missing from this game that Poker has is really lack of information. That moment when you have AA and your opponent has no way of knowing is the sweetest gameplay moment in the world. Yes, "luck" has something to do with it (it's like the heavens have aligned for just you at that moment). But there's also just something amazing about being in the wise when your opponent knows nothing. Having the secret way-upper hand.
In this game (regular CM and the suited version), there is simply too much information about what your opponent might have, especially after pick 3. The following happens reasonably often:
--You KNOW you've won, and your opponent KNOWS you've won too.
That NEVER happens in Poker.
What does happen in Poker is the case where you know you've won (like you do regularly in CM), but your opponent never knows.
Though this case may come very rarely (every 500 hands or something... even AA only comes every 221 hands on average, and AA is usually not a guaranteed winner after the flop), it comes often enough, and the experience is sweet enough, that it's worth it. There's a saying that poker players loath to miss a hand. You don't even want to get up to take a break, because the next hand could be one of these (this isn't rational, but there it is).
There is no way to get around this difference with any kind of crossing-choices-on-a-grid mechanism. Well, unless the grid is huge or something, but then the players are just replacing a RNG. Yeah, that might route around the law, but it's no fun task for the players. There's a reason we write computer programs to compute random numbers for us (because rolling dice or whatever is tedious and uninteresting---a non-choice that the computer should automate).
I mostly implemented the experimental mode as a lark, just to make such a game a reality and try playing it. It was way faster to fold this into CM than to make a paper prototype or whatever. Without playing it, the question remained: is it the non-monotonicity in Poker that makes it hum?
So, anyway, mostly likely, the numerical purity and beauty and occult-nature of the original will reign, just because it's better to make a totally novel and self-consistent game than a poker-like game that isn't all that much better anyway.
Poker hands are ranked by rarity. It's harder to get a flush than a straight, etc:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poker_probability
Ties are broken based on card rank, though, so maybe that's what you mean. AAxxx is no more rare than KKxxx, but AAxxx wins.
I suppose there are certain hands that poker doesn't even consider, like a 4-1 partial flush, which is pretty rare, but worthless. Maybe that's what you mean? Yes, certain hands are dubbed special, but among the special ones, they are ranked by rarity.
Anyway, the ranking in this game is slightly different than in Poker, because it's only 3 squares, so there's no full house and no 4-of-a-kind. 3-of-a-kind is much more rare, relative to other hands, than it is in Poker, so here it's the second best hand, beating flushes and straights.
But poker rankings mostly translate.
9's in this game are way more valuable than 2's (they are the Aces in this game), so some squares are still the attractor points.
But regarding your point about things needing to change to keep people interested... well, that means the core game just isn't strong enough, on its own. I don't want people saying, "Man, I am SO sick of playing this game, but I really want that amulet."
I also find that the CM becomes more interesting for me at higher stakes. But that's not the case for me with Poker after playing it for years (yes, it is more tense at higher stakes, but it's just as engaging on a pure game level at low stakes or even with play money).
I hear you about the possibility of a score graph here
There are 7000+ possible hands for each player. I'm not sure how many ties there are in there, though.
Looking just at flushes, there are 84 distinctly ranked hands (computed by C(9,3) ).
There are also roughly 84 distinctly ranked "nothing" hands. 7 of those are straights.
There are 7 straight flushes.
There are 72 distinctly ranked pair hands.
There are 9 distinctly ranked triple hands.
That's 263, which is more than will fit on the current score graph.
Yeah, it was pretty crazy how little code needed to change to make this work. Client side, it's basically just a new skin for the numbers 1..36. Server side, it's basically just a new scoring method.
v25 introduces a new, experimental game mode.
Column picking and betting works exactly the same as the original mode, as explained in the how-to-play video.
Scoring is totally different.
You win by having a better set of three squares by the end than your opponent. The possible kinds of sets are ranked as described below, based on their probability (more rare occurrences are ranked higher):
1. Straight Flush (three numbers in a sequence of all the same suit)
2. Three of the same number.
3. Flush (three of the same suit).
4. Straight (three numbers in a row)
5. Pair (two of the same number)
6. High valued square
In the case of a tie in the above rankings, the player with the higher-numbered square wins.
Examples:
999 beats 888
876 beats 765
854 (non-flush) beats 754 (non-flush)
In the case of a tie in the highest numbered square, the next highest square wins.
Example:
965 flush beats 954 flush
954 flush beats 953 flush
885 beats 884
854 (non-flush) beats 853 (non-flush)
Good news is that this ranking is the same as Poker in every way except that three of a kind is ranked higher in this game.
These rankings are based on the following ways these sets can occur.
There are 7,140 possible sets.
There are 4,620 ways to make nothing (65%)
There are 1,728 ways to make a pair (24%)
There are 420 ways to make a straight (5%)
There are 308 ways to make a flush (4%)
There are 36 ways to make three of the same number (0.5%)
There are 28 ways to make a straight flush (0.3%)
Yep yep.... so v25, just released, contains this experimental mode. Exactly the same game played with different things on the grid and scored differently.
Also, journal doorman has told me that journal doorman wants to forfeit any prizes.
For people who one multiple cash prizes of the same amount:
I'd have them auto-win the first one that they won, and drop the later ones that have exactly the same cash value. I should have had each day's prizes go up by $1 or something to avoid this.
Thank you for working on these spreadsheets everyone! I probably won't be reaching out to people until after I get back from Vegas, so the prizes will likely be going out next week.
Well, I do like that this game, as it stands, is a totally new, unique invention. The score graph and all that. I'm very proud of that stuff.
I'm now considering this other game as a separate mode. Nothing like that (a suited version, where players are picking rows and columns and trying to make pairs, trips, straights, and flushes) has ever existed before either. Yeah, there would still be the reveal. Exact same game, with exactly the same graphics, except the 1..36 numbers would be replaced with 1..9 in four suits (or 1..12 in three suits... or 1..6 in six suits?). I'm considering this as an experimental mode, where when you're starting a game, you can pick that mode, and it will appear differently on the game list.
This generally goes against my philosophy of design purity, but I'm really interested in playing that other version of this game, and this is the path of least resistance to actually getting to play it (1000+ existing accounts with real money in place and a betting system, etc.)
There has been some discussion with various people over the past 8 months about what this game lacks compared to Holdem poker. That somehow, this game doesn't have the drama that Holdem has (not even heads up Holdem). After all, in Holdem, AA can be beaten by 7d-2h. A hand can go from being the best to being the worst depending on what other cards appear.
In math terms, the "turn another card" function is non-monotone in the "X beats Y" partial order where X and Y are pairs of hole cards. Turning a 2 card suddenly turns AA > 22 into AA+2 < 22+2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_theory
In CM, the partial order of scores is simply the the standard "<" on their numerical total. The "Make another pick" function simply adds a new number in. So, if X < Y, and you consider what would happen if either player got Z added in, we know that X+Z < Y+Z.
This is further amplified by the lack of shared values, because it's never the case in CM that both players get Z added in (the way that the turned 2 card affects both players in Holdem).
Effectively, if you have two strong picks on the first two, and you suspect your opponent has two weak picks, your third pick really doesn't matter much. There's no drama there.
Here's a variant of this game that would partly improve the game in this direction:
A version of Cordial Minuet on a 6x6 grid with numbers from 1-9 (instead of 1-36) and four suits (skulls, hearts, coins, and pentagrams). Then, you can get three of a kind (three 8's), which beats a flush (three hearts) which beats... I dunno, I'd have to work out the math. But you could have straights (5-6-7) and straight flushes (harder than 3 of a kind? not sure). Anyway, this would be a brand new game with brand new math, different from Poker. No longer a real magic square, though, which means making the grid balanced and fair may be non-trivial (could use a method proposed by Cullman... 9s 9h 9c 9p are 36, 35, 34, 33, and 1s 1h 1c 1p are 4, 3, 2, 1... then just use the normal magic square code.... the game could even use the exact same protocol as CM, just with different graphics for the 36..1 numbers, and different code on the server to determine the winner).
You wouldn't need the score graph anymore, either, because the numbers wouldn't sum up at all. It would be a pattern matching game like Poker instead of an arithmetic game. No scores at all, just hand strength. You know, 9-2-1 would beat 8-6-5 because the 9 is high.
Maybe the final pick could produce two shared cards instead of more hidden cards. So, players would use their 2 hidden picks plus one of the two visible picks to make the best 3-pick hand that they can.
It might be a way better game... but still not a huge draw for the poker crowd. Still, a way better game means it would have more chance of growing from 1000 accounts over time, just through "this is awesome" word of mouth (despite all the heads-up problems we have discussed).
On the other hand, it loses all of its true magical stuff. 666 becomes 270, etc. Also, much more gamey (it would look like a match-3 game or something).
I was aware of this possibility long ago, but avoided it for these reasons. I really like the elegant, inventive purity of the current game. I just feel like there is something missing. I still play loads of Poker, but I rarely want to play CM.
There's yet another version where you keep 1-36 and just add 4 suits. Then you sum scores as normal, but give bonus points for flushes. This is not quite as interesting as either extreme.
Keyboard controls in a match:
1-6: pick columns (first green, then red).
Enter: commit move or bet
Up/Down Arrow: adjust bet by one coin
Page Up/Down: adjust bet by ten coins
F: Fold
Mousing over a square is asking, "What scores are possible if I (or my opponent) actually got this square?"
If you mouse over an uncolored square, the score graph shows you what would happen if you got that square. If you mouse over a green square in a green column (like before your opponent's pick has come through), the same thing happens.
If you mouse over a red square (one of your opponent's possible squares), the score graph shows you what would happen if your opponent had that square.
Clicking on a square "locks" in it place so that you can go over and mouse around the score graph. Clicking elsewhere clears the selected square.