Quote:
Originally Posted by steamraise
Let's get recreational players thinking about their equity and pot odds.
A rule to make them play better? Poker lessons? Not a good idea iyam.
Good thing I already said that in my original post.
I don't think it would be aimed at the recreational player. It rewards making good decisions. The better the player is at making good decisions, the more they should like this game. Bad players would get destroyed quicker than they would in regular poker because luck is much less of a factor.
What makes this theoretical game interesting (to me at least) is that the game is still a game of incomplete information and there is still some randomness involved (especially in the short term), but the randomness plays much less of a factor so a player's actual results will match their true skill over a much shorter period of time. This makes it interesting in terms of measuring a players skill level.
With regular, real poker it is near impossible to accurately differentiate between the skill levels of two poker players due to the variance being so high. Take the recent match between Negreanu and Polk. From the results (Polk winning) it is likely that he is the more skilled player, but the variance is still high enough that it is not certain. Polk could have just run hotter in their match. Now imagine if they instead played for Sklansky Bucks and the pots were divided by cumulative equity? Thier final results would have been fairly close to the actual difference in their skill.
So yeah, as a game for the masses where random strangers play against random strangers it is a terrible game because it just becomes a feeding frenzy for the sharks. But as a game to measure skill against closely skilled opponent(s), it is far better than regular poker.