My column in the last issue discussed going to the Cherokee Tulsa Casino and Resort in February for the
Oklahoma Poker Championships, where I was directly involved with the planning and running of the world's first duplicate-poker tournament. (Duplicate means that each table in the room plays the same hands, as the initial hands are duplicated ahead of time, and then the copied hands are used at each table in play.)
I have been working with the duplicate-poker company that ran the tournament, e-PokerUSA, since last summer. The February tournament represented an enormous amount of work by a lot of people. I am the only professional poker player on the staff, but we have a number of other people in our company who know poker well. Cherokee Tulsa Casino has a poker staff second to none, and they also worked very hard to plan and execute this event. We had absolutely nothing to use as a model for duplicate poker, and were free to innovate as we pleased. The tournament format that we eventually used, I was happy to endorse.
A major decision in formatting a duplicate tournament is whether to play duplicate style all the way through or only up to some point, like a qualifier for the final table. We decided to preserve the duplicate character of the tournament throughout. Our tournament was set up to end with six finalists playing a round robin of short matches to determine the winner. This format is better for legal purposes. We consider duplicate poker to be a skill game, which gives us the ability to function in places where regular poker is having legality problems, such as on the Internet.
Is regular poker a game of luck or a game of skill? Obviously, it has both elements. Many states go by whichever predominates, luck or skill. This question is not easy to answer, since luck predominates in the short run and skill in the long run. The question of whether poker is more a game of skill has never been definitively settled by the courts.
When you eliminate the "luck of the draw," as duplicate poker does, there is an excellent basis for categorizing poker as a game of skill. There is no randomizing agent to distribute the luck when you play the same cards at each table, and then compare your results against only the other people who held your exact hand at the other tables. Understand that we are talking in the legal sense here. There is a luck element in any contest, even athletics. You and I each hit our golf ball into the same tree. Yours goes into the lake, and mine ricochets onto the fairway - or vice versa. Someone in a professional golf match-play event gets paired against Tiger Woods, and everyone else gets a somewhat softer opponent. There are lucky and unlucky matchups. In our duplicate tournament, it is nice if your opponents who are sitting in your seat at the other tables are mostly of the Frankie Fishwich variety, rather than a bunch of Berry Johnston clones. Don't let anyone tell you that there is no luck at all in competitive games.
Another important decision in formatting a duplicate-poker tournament is how to eliminate players (or whether to do it at all). We believed that stack size was such an important part of providing "equal conditions of contest" that we decided to replenish every player's chips after each hand, and simply keep a running score of the results. We did set a limit of "three stacks and you're out." You cannot give players unlimited access to chips. Each hand started with everyone having $10,000 in playing chips, so you did not get eliminated unless you went more than $30,000 in the hole. At the end of each session (except the first one), scores were compared against the others in your seat, and the low half of the players failed to make the cut for the next session.
To give players an incentive to accumulate chips, rather than just make the cut, we gave them carryover chips into the next session. The carryover chips were added to their net chip count at the start of the next session (not to their playing chips). The amount added was not the amount they were up in the previous session, but a smaller preset figure based on their ranking against others in their seat. In fact, they could be down in chips for a session and still be ranked No. 1 and getting the maximum carryover, as long as everyone else in their seat was down more than they were.
I am sorry to say that the event was not the complete success we had hoped it would be. Both our main server and our backup server crashed after the second session, causing a five-hour delay in the event. It took the computer programmers that long to get the system ready to be used again. To say the players were unhappy about this long delay is to put it mildly. Fortunately, once the computer system was restored, the rest of the tournament did not encounter any technical problems.
A major problem with duplicate poker is "shooting," the term for wild play to induce a big swing. I remember that in one of our satellite events, in which we were qualifying two players in each seat position and there were four tables, a couple of players in a certain seat played an 8-3 offsuit for all of their money on the last hand of the session. This is a correct strategy, as a small chance is better than no chance at all. The 8-3 won, and the player who had been leading in that seat position was ousted and unhappy. After this happened, it was decided that even in satellites, we would not let players know how anyone was doing at another table.
The next time we run a duplicate-poker tournament, we are going to make some adjustments that will make it even harder to shoot with wild play. We are going to keep the blinds the same throughout a session, rather than have them double at the midpoint. And we are going to reduce the amount of chips that you can be down before you are eliminated for excessive chip use.
I think duplicate poker will arouse a lot of interest in the poker world, especially in those environments where regular poker has encountered legal difficulties. There is something very attractive about having a much larger skill element in a poker contest. We should not let an unfortunate computer failure stop the growth of poker in a direction that should be interesting and enjoyable for both the players and a TV audience.
Bob Ciaffone has authored four poker books, Middle Limit Holdem Poker, Pot-limit and No-limit Poker, Improve Your Poker, and Omaha Poker. All can be ordered from Card Player. Ciaffone is available for poker lessons: e-mail [email protected]. His website is www.pokercoach.us, where you can get his rulebook, Robert's Rules of Poker, for free. Bob also has a website called www.fairlawsonpoker.org.
