Okay, hear me out on this one. There is a chess format called correspondence chess in which the moves are relayed by mail (now usually email). The idea is that the players have a lot of time to think about each move, so they can explore the position extremely deeply. I'd like to attempt a game of correspondence poker. Here's how I see it working: We set up two teams of several players. Each team has a captain responsible for the team's final decision. Then we generate a random hand of HUNL and play it out, one action per day. So for example, Team A gets an email saying, "Your hand is 10s9h. You are in the SB. (We would already have established blinds/stack sizes) Your move." They have a day to think/discuss, then they have to send their move to Team B (e.g., "we raise to 2.5 BBs"). Now Team B has a day to come up with their move. Each team knows its own hand but not the opponent's, just like normal poker. At the appropriate time both teams see the flop, turn, river. The goal of this exercise is to think deeply about what the BEST play is, given everything you know about poker. It gives you a chance to explore bet sizing and leveling issues that you might fudge over in a normally paced game. Would anyone be interested in trying this out? I think it would be really cool if some good players got involved and afterwards we could post the teams' discussions/thought processes.

Count me in

With one decision a day it would take, what, a week to play a hand? In a year, if you played every day, you could play like 50 hands?

Don't invite Tiffany. She will call the clock on you.

3rd party obviously would declare the hand. Sounds like bad beat city or at least some very unusual hands.

On the other hand, strategy discussions are usually worth it.

Consider multiple hands (like multitableing) instead of just one hand daily?

Yea 1 hand a day = boring. Like a hand an hour would be suitable time for two people to discuss a hand throughly! More hands like two at a time and and setup a system so captians pm/email the other team their action when they get done and the other team then sends it back when they are done and the other team does he same. And they could send two handsat a time and each team member goes over one hand then they recheck each other/ discuss. Still alot of work though for whoever in charge

I think 1 hand a day is ok for people who have to work.

So the idea is to remove pacing and pressure, two key ingredients in making mistakes- then put up several very theoretically sound players against eachother. And then play 200 hands/year? It's obvious there willl be no winner.

This is one of the more preposterous ideas I've heard lately. Poker ain't chess, decisions generally aren't that deep or complicated. What exactly are you going to pontificate over all day you nerd loooooool. Think long think wrong, so forth.

It could be nice but your should definetly not if you want to improve your game. Too much dead time to get a decent amount of hands into the sample.

What if we could find/design software that let us play a hand live, but with like 4 minutes/decision. Then each team could be on skype or whatever and talk through things. We could get 5-10 hands an hour, and wouldn't have to waste time corresponding about our decision to fold 83o.

I am liking this idea.

Now how to implement???????

I like the 5-10 mins/move alot better. Poker isn't chess, there isn't one optimal move that is best EVERY time.

It looks like maybe three or four people have expressed interest. I'd like to get a couple more to make it work on a team level. I would be willing to act as a third party and relay hand information to both teams (this is very easy to do, even with just a physical deck of cards). If it proves to be a valuable exercise we can keep it going.

Re: making the time like 5-10 minutes: for me the point of the exercise is the slowness. I think if you make it one action/day it might actually take less time, or at least be more convenient, because then you can just think about it for as long as you want each day, whenever you want. If it's 5-10 minutes/action you have to set aside an hour or two specifically to do this. I do like the idea of multi-tableing.

To explain a little more why I think this might be a good idea: I see it as being like reviewing a hand history, but without knowledge of future streets or opponent's cards/future actions. The value, if any, is in the thought process and discussion. The idea is NOT to prove who is the best player (too small sample size) or to make this your only poker-related activity.

There actually is a free platform for playing online correspondence poker, and it supports just the type of game you guys have been discussing.

Check it out and see if it is what you were looking for: correspondencepoker.com

Im in

great idea. count me in

OK...this guy creates a forum account just to respond to my thread (has no other posts) ...and links to a website that is exactly my idea...what are the chances this is NOT a scam? Haven't clicked on the link, guessing my computer would just immediately explode.

In other news, anyone who is still interested in actually doing this send me a PM and I will set up a game.

I do agree it's weird and I can't decide if it's against the forum rules or not... it's pretty close. But I did visit the site, and it does seem legitimate. I created an account, there are people there you can play correspondence games with, and you can start your own.

FWIW, I did something similar to this a year or two ago.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/58...e-nltrn-43773/

Except with the forum acting as hero, and a friend of mine acting as the villain via email. Apparently the polls disappeared some time ago.

There was much discussion in the first and last few pages about how it could be improved. Some said it was too slow, some too fast, etc. Overall seemed like a success though.

Anyway, if the teams are playing HU against each other, it should probably be in the HU forum. Good Luck!


edit: I think the biggest problem was that half the decisions were more or less automatic, and so I either had to do them automatically, which took away the interaction of the thread, or allow time for a landslide vote, which was a waste of time.


edit2: then the other problem (that occurred with voting) was that occasionally, there were situations where the votes were split between 2 or even 3 decisions. For example

IIRC resulted in a 3way tie in the poll. At which point, whaddya gonna do? 2/3 of the people who voted have to continue playing the hand in a way they disagree with.

I also registered and joined a few games, 20 odd to start with ... looks like people are mostly playing about 100 tables concurrently.

The UI's OKish (at last, poker I can play on my phone!) though it would be nice if there was an easy way of storing/accessing notes.

Anyway I'll let people know if it's worth doing (from an intellectual interest POV, obv, not a financial one!)

ps Dromar

What 33% of people wanted to open fold 3s?

The options were bet, c/f, c/c, c/r.

Huh, I thought it looked scam-y, but I guess if the website is legit and it works that is the way to go.