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This game seems like it shouldn't work playing one-off games with no money on the line. How do you win in that context - by ending up with the most money at the
by dmurray 2y ago
This game seems like it shouldn't work playing one-off games with no money on the line. How do you win in that context - by ending up with the most money at the end of the game? That would change the gameplay very significantly - a strategy that has you end with $1000 one time in three and 0 the rest should be favoured over one where you end up with $300 every time.
Poker solves this with poker tournaments: everyone starts with say $10,000 in play money and plays until one player wins it all. Backgammon solves it with match play: two players play first to say 7 points. In both cases, additional complexity is introduced to the game as optimal strategy changes depending on the size of the bets relative to the players' stacks or the number of points remaining.
Backgammon is just about playable as a one-off without a cube, though not by serious players. A single hand of poker without wagering makes no sense at all. Figgie seems closer to poker than backgammon, based on my reading. But it's being presented as a game to play one-off with bots or strangers. What am I missing?
- pclmulqdq 2y agoIt's Jane Street. If two people haven't played this game for $10,000, I would be very surprised.
- philipwhiuk 2y agoTheir version of Liar's Poker.
- philipwhiuk 2y agoI would bet that at Jane Street they absolutely do put money on the line when playing internally.
- dfxm12 2y agoA single hand of poker without wagering makes no sense at all. There are a lot of variations of poker. Playing single hands of, for example, five card draw makes sense without wagering.
- JoshTriplett 2y agoThat's true, but it's not very fun. A series of hands in which you determine how heavily to invest allows strategy to control for randomness. A single-hand five-card-draw showdown is a single decision about which cards to replace, and is largely determined by the shuffle, and the single bit of strategy "how many cards did the people before me ask for".
- thehappyfellow 2y agoYou should play a lot of hands, or organise a tournament, for Figgie to really make sense. It's fun but I prefer to play in person.
- LPisGood 2y agoHow do you play in person? Are the cards for sale somewhere?
- thehappyfellow 2y agoJust a normal deck is fine, you have to prepare it but it’s not a big deal.
- LPisGood 2y agoI think that is kind of a big deal. You either need to prepare many identical decks in advance or come up with an elaborate selection procedure you repeat every 4 minutes.
- programjames 2y agoJust switch dealers each round and have them sit out...
- AngryData 2y agoI don't think it would be too hard. After the round players throw their cards in by suit face up to 4 piles, every suit gets topped up to 12 cards. Have one person take all four suits under the table and then hands them in random order to the dealer. The dealer randomizes them themselves so nobody can know which suit is which, then removes the required number of cards from the random suits and discards them, and shuffles the deck. Obviously it isn't super quick, but once people know whats going on it doesn't take that long either.
- dmurray 2y agoI assume this was originally played with normal decks, but the screenshots show special decks with only suits. Doesn't this make a difference to gameplay? With normal suits, if you trade a few times, you may be able to establish that twelve distinct cards are in a suit even though you never saw more than say four of them at once Maybe there typically isn't enough trading for this to make a difference? If there is, it does introduce an extra skill to the game of remembering the cards that have been seen before. That's valuable in lots of card games including some poker variants, but it doesn't seem like something JS would emphasize training. If you have 12 identical decks you can turn them into 13 Figgie decks by combining all the cards of each value.