My cold from last week has shifted into a bit of bronchitis (and here I thought my virus-fighting strategy of staying up really late drinking beer would clear everything up), so I’m kind of groggy and lethargic. And I have book edits to work on, which precludes taking a long time to write blog posts about science, so here’s some babble about card games.
Saturday night at the Tor party, a bunch of people started playing poker using Tor.com buttons as chips. They were playing the obligatory Texas Hold ‘Em, and there were a couple of guys standing off to the side (one of whom reminded me of Razib), complaining about the choice of game.
Now, while I suspect that the dominance of Hold ‘Em has more to do with the fact that it can be played with 10 people than any features of the game play, their objection surprised me. The complaint was, basically, that Hold ‘Em lets you fold too quickly, after only one round of betting. The games being held up as superior to Hold ‘Em were Follow the Queen and Baseball, because the plethora of wild cards force players to stick with bad hands in the hopes that they’ll turn good.
This is an argument I have literally never heard before. Whenever I’ve encountered poker purists talking about the merits of different games, the argument has always been that games with fewer wild cards were better, and required more skill. These guys on Saturday were arguing that the extra random element of introducing lots of wild cards (and changing wild cards, at that) required more skill.
My immediate reaction was that this was the rare conversation about cards that made me want to play poker with the speaker, for money. It’s possible, though, that this is a widely held opinion that I have somehow never encountered before. So I’ll throw this out to the ScienceBlogs readership:
Which do you prefer, a game with a large random element, or one that minimizes the randomness? Which do you think requires more skill?
(NOTE: I’m not sure about the status of the spam filters since the upgrade, but in the past the words “Poker” and “Hold ‘Em” have tended to trip the spam filters, and get comments blocked or held for moderation. I recommend trying to avoid those words, using acronyms or something.)