CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

cullman

Member

Registered: 2015-01-01

Posts: 65

Skill based poker game, built on CM's ideas

Judge Doorman/Cullman here. 

After some talks with Jason, Max and I have come up with a pseudo-hold em like game.

Here is basically how it works :

It shuffles a deck of 52 cards.  It takes 36 off the top of the deck and force ranks them, the highest card a 36 and the lowest a 1. It then takes the other 16 cards and force ranks them too.  It uses the same magic square concept to make sure the columns and rows are balanced.  It then displays you to matrixes of cards one 6x6 and one 4x4.  Our game is a little different than hold em as you get 3 hole cards and there are 4 community cards.  You get your 3 hole cards by using the selection process just like CM on the 6x6 grid.  On the first turn you pick your columns on the big matrix.  You then have an opportunity to bet.  Then on the next turn you chose your columns for your second hole card and your columns for your first community card.  Another round of betting.  Then you choose your columns for your third hole card and your column for your second community card.  Then your 3 hole cards and the 2 community cards you can see are revealed.  Round of betting.  Then the other 2 community cards are revealed, showing you the total 7 cards your best 5 card hand will be made from.  Round of betting.  Then the game decides who has won the round.  Rinse and repeat. 

Here is the website :

http://54.85.76.113/

You can create a game, by giving it a name (if you don't give it a name, your opponent won't be able to click on it).  People can see the list of games that are listed by name.  Both players start with 100 chips.  Obviously, it isn't for real money at this point.  I'd love to get the community's feedback on this, whether or not there are some improvements to be made, how fun it is, etc.  Most importantly, I'd like to know if anyone would be interested if we created a version of this that you could play for real money.  We would keep it web based, allowing people to be able to play on any device.

Thanks,

cullman

Professor Chin

Member

Registered: 2015-01-13

Posts: 54

Re: Skill based poker game, built on CM's ideas

That's very interesting!

Within few days I'll try it and will be glad to give some feedback.

Max...?! some conspiration theorists suggest it might be JA first name's leaked out

cullman

Member

Registered: 2015-01-01

Posts: 65

Re: Skill based poker game, built on CM's ideas

Nah, Max isn't JA.  Max doesn't really play CM.  He is my cousin and business partner.  He is the coder on Terminal Heist for those of you familiar with that slow moving project.

jasonrohrer

Administrator

Registered: 2014-11-20

Posts: 802

Re: Skill based poker game, built on CM's ideas

After creating a game, you can return home, see your own game on the list, and join against yourself.  Return home should cancel the game.

It would also be good if you waited for an opponent somehow, instead of going straight to the first move with no one there.  Like, a holding page that looped/slept and asked the server if the opponent was there.  Even make it bong when the opponent arrives.

Otherwise, it's just too inconvenient to try the game with such a sparse player population.  I need to background it and do other things, so it needs to make noise when it's ready, otherwise I'm going to miss my opponent.

cullman

Member

Registered: 2015-01-01

Posts: 65

Re: Skill based poker game, built on CM's ideas

Ok we'll add those features. This is meant to be a pretty rough draft to see if it's even worth pursuing as a concept. In the meantime perhaps people can coordinate on Chatzy.

..

Member

Registered: 2014-11-21

Posts: 259

Re: Skill based poker game, built on CM's ideas

Wow, it's a happy coincidence that 52 = 6*6 + 4*4. I'm impressed at this squeezing of poker into CM, awesome prototype!

I haven't managed to get into a game with anyone, but I did play a couple rounds against myself.

I'm surprised at the way that  community cards work. So you've replaced CM's reveal-a-column step with revealing the full set of 4 community cards. Before and after the reveal there are respectively 24 and 6 possible hands for each player, compared to CM's 6 and 2. That's quite innovative, but I 'm not sure I agree with hiding two of the community cards. Yes, I think having more than 2 possible hands on the final betting round is an improvement. But I think this worsens things in earlier rounds.  It adds so much uncertainty because there are so many possible hands to consider, in addition to more choices at each move. I feel like I won't manage to do that in my head, which is going to make it hard to figure out what hands the opponent is comparing and hence what they will do. Looks like this is a game about working out hand odds and betting instead of reading minds.

Also, there's a second potential problem, which is that if you want to pick two shared cards with no preference to their order, then having each player pick two rows/columns would be bad, because each player has no preference to the ordering of their row/column, resulting in 50/50 chances of each two different pairs getting picked even after both players pick their columns.
Now, that's not the situation here because there is a preference: you get to see one card and not the other, so you would ideally order columns so that that result of one column is important to you or both players and the other one isn't, so that there's information asymmetry. Still, that seems difficult to consider. A lot of players thought CM's experimental mode was too difficult to reason about, and that's miles simpler than this.
Of course, if you only picked one community cards column per move then there would be nothing to reveal in the reveal step, it would be a big change.

When you finish the round it breaks. Firstly, the community cards grid doesn't update to show the two cards the other person picked after they are revealed (in the Community Cards: line). Secondly, I see this, after going all-in on the second last betting round, with 10 coins initially in the pot and each player having 90 coins. (It doesn't seem to screw up without an all-in).

You won

Your stack: 0
Their stack: 95

Pot: 10

Which doesn't really make any sense. After going to the next board, I get

Your stack: 8
Their stack: 93

Pot: 4

Last edited by .. (2015-06-05 16:27:03)

cullman

Member

Registered: 2015-01-01

Posts: 65

Re: Skill based poker game, built on CM's ideas

Thanks for the feedback, that's what we are looking for, so if anyone has some suggestions on how to improve game play we are all ears. Yeah, I think the whole 36+16=52 is a bit of kismet, and silly or not one of the things that makes me interested in this version. Whether or not we have the way that hole cards and community cards figured out the right way remains to be seen (my guess is no). We'll take a look at this bug it's a very rough prototype (we've spent less than a week throwing this together). We could somewhat easily implement the red and green bar scheme CM has. There are something like 7350 possible poker hands. So we could take the rank of all your possible hands and divide them by 73.5 and give you a rough idea with a 1 to 100 score of where your hand and potential hands stand. Would that be helpful?

jasonrohrer

Administrator

Registered: 2014-11-20

Posts: 802

Re: Skill based poker game, built on CM's ideas

Josh implemented those "bars" for CM experimental mode, so you should find out from him how helpful they were.

Dan_Dan84

Member

Registered: 2015-02-14

Posts: 106

Re: Skill based poker game, built on CM's ideas

Thanks for sharing your game prototype, cullman. It's an interesting concept.

After playing a game and a half, however, I found it a bit overwhelming. As .. pointed out, there are just way too many hands to consider. I was really picking blindly (much like I did in experimental CM), and even towards the end of the hand when neither of us had folded, it was tough to puzzle out all of the possible hands my opponent might have.

Because there are so many possible hands, it may not be necessary to have a score graph for the first couple of turns (until at least two community cards are visible). After all, even in CM, the score graph isn't really useful until after the second pick. Perhaps once two community cards are visible, a display could indicate what you could still get, and what your opponent might have. Once all four community cards are visible, then the display could indicate what hands your opponent might have.

In any case, it's an interesting prototype, but I did not find it all that fun to play. It's simply too confusing and overwhelming as is, with so many possibilities to consider. The mind-reading aspect is gone, so while the game gets around the RNG issue, it is not as interesting as CM in this regard. With that said, the addition of the slow-reveal community cards mechanic (something experimental CM did not have) does add that "Hail Mary" aspect that Holdem has, where that card that could save you might turn up on the river.

cullman

Member

Registered: 2015-01-01

Posts: 65

Re: Skill based poker game, built on CM's ideas

Thanks for the feedback....I do wonder if the bars could help bring the mind reading aspect back to the game though.  If you moused over the bars of your opponent you could more quickly determine if they are going for their possible straight or flush or what...I might do a rev with the bars and see if it improves things.  I like that it's more like poker, and I like that unlike CM you can still win after getting a suboptimal pick in the first round, but I agree that it's so vast that I ultimately play like I am picking at random (but I also think that's likely how I would play CM if it weren't for real money).  I think the only way to really test this would be to set up a tournament with some real money behind so people cared enough to actually try hard to win.  I personally haven't played a game where I really cared if I won or not...Thoughts?

..

Member

Registered: 2014-11-21

Posts: 259

Re: Skill based poker game, built on CM's ideas

Caring about winning certainly makes a larger difference in your behaviour in games like poker and CM than others (because you won't throw away money to test every bluff). But first gaining some experience with the game is even more important. I can't really say anything about it yet.

With the score graph you would be able to reason about any number of possible hands by reducing it to probability of winning (assuming some way to show counts per bucket). But if you're playing based solely on probabilities then the actual rules of the game wouldn't be very relevant. Also, realise that the score graph doesn't actually show you what score graph the opponent sees, which means the score graph is not an ideal "medium" for double guessing games.

Would it be such a bad thing to take out the reveal step? If you want a certain number of betting rounds (do poker variants vary in number of rounds?) then you can hit it by adjusting whether the the community card selection is simultaneous or not.