A secret poker game you can play on the subway(experience.prfalken.dev) |
A secret poker game you can play on the subway(experience.prfalken.dev) |
And to think Poker is the right move after we all battle our Balatro addiction?
It would be interesting to read HN's ideas on how you can simulate the shared information part of the game in such a scenario.
This next suggestion would stretch the "poker" definition somewhat, but I think it retains the same characteristics (imperfect information, shared "cards").
You start from a shared list of attributes (coat color, presence of a hat, etc.) and designate a row of seats. Each person gets one attribute secretly. You wager after each stop following poker conventions.
Only downside to this is that unlike poker, your hand can get worse after a stop.
If I got somebody wearing a black coat, this has no impact on the chance of my opponent having a black coated passenger.
There is no game of Poker. It is a wide variety of games like 5-card draw, Omaha, Texas, studs, Chinese open face poker. Also a slot machine where you draw 5 cards or pretty much any game that uses classical poker hand rankings is called poker. There is also a planning poker.
I think the name is fine
It's limited info, random, there are weak or strong starting positions, and you can bluff. Tournament style might be interesting because of the Prisoners' Dilemma. But I gotta say, it's a lot nerdier than this subway game.
* Both think of two numbers 0-50 and only say one aloud. Add the other person's number to your secret one and mod by 50. Then buyer adds 50.
** Seller penalized N, buyer penalized N - 50 iirc.
It's an imperfect solution but I still like the premise of this game, it just needs to be field tested a bit.
> The most obvious issues with...
... your comment is that you're trying to analyse everything instead of just having fun. Not everything is a math' problem. It's OK to have fun things that don't make sense. I don't think the author is trying to create a perfect gaming experience. I think the author is just trying to have fun.
I also expect HN to have lots more people interested in game theory and game design than any random place so it seemed appropriate to share and invite people to throw ideas about (which is also kind of fun).
Let's have fun any way we can!
You can fix this by allowing each stop to be a round of betting.
A way to make the hands fair that comes to me right away is to take some unambiguous information about riders (coat color, presence of a hat, etc..) and calculate a hash that you can read as/transform to a hand. This should transform the distribution to uniform, at least to a degree suitable for an occasional play.
Though, this will void the strategical part of the game.
How do you get the players to agree on whether some person is elderly or not? Some people look 10 years younger than their age, while others look 10 years older. Short of asking people for their age, it seems to remain guesswork...
I don't think that's true. People get off when they get to their destination whether or not it is easy to reach the door, and sit in available spaces.
But also, now that I think about it, this may only be caused by french metro layouts, I'm from France too and this fact seems true to me.
If your train is only a long corridor with seats on the edges, the "difficulty" of getting to/from a door is almost the same everywhere.
But in the french metro you have foldable seats right next to the doors, and groups of 4 seats between doors, and when the metro is busy, it's harder to get out of these 4 seats groupings.
In other words, you pick immediately once the game starts. Look around to see which row you think has the best chance to develop into something good by the time you reach the designated station.
- to stand in a specific place in order to (subtly) direct other passengers into a specific section of the car, or
- to take a seat yourself and give it up to an elderly person later on, in an attempt to gain an extra ace ;)
You choose any time to start (mutually agreed upon)
You can choose any row you want. The chance (skill?) comes into play in that people can get up from those seats and new people can come in. That's why you have to choose an end station. It probably wouldn't be very fun for just one stop.
It seems you don't have any control over the hand, no control over the evaluation, and there is no betting either.
Something more akin to bingo, where you call out when a winning combination is found, would be a lot more engaging.
Or maybe keep your chosen hand a secret, so you can do the normal betting/bluffing/folding of Poker? With the added fun that your hand might change over the course of the game.
("Tube" has long been a colloquial term for London's Subway system).
- https://www.simonlevene.com/portfolio/tube-poker
- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0818537/
Edit : in fact the points are exactly as describes at around 03:45 https://youtu.be/UttaYUv5zYg?t=221
But moreover, folks here buffer a lot of personal space, and seats fill in checkerboard patterns, bags and parcels on unoccupied seats, and when the checkerboard is full, most folks would rather stand than request/insist/apologize for sitting down
Things like beanies, grocery bags, formal shoes could all be used to make suits and you have a bit more choices to play with on how you count the person. Do I count them as a "formal shoes" or a "grocery bag"? What do I think I'm more likely to see board later?
But all of this is moot because TFA doesn't define "suits" for the "cards" anyway. And of course the relative probabilities do change when you only have 5 ranks. (And we're also effectively "drawing" without replacement; there are an effectively unlimited number of each rank available.)
Which, frankly, I quite prefer since there's less fuzziness about classification of age groups.
That's the bit that did it for me.
Playing games with the faces
They've all come to look for America
when is a women a women? and when does she become 'elderly' ?
you also cannot see if a teenager is 19 or 20.
What happens if you get on 'that time of the day' and/or 'that specific station' and there are a bunch of old folks and you end up with "all cards are aces?". Someone is cheating!!! :)
But its a cute idea
I don't think it's particularly harmful for someone to play it, but I would rather set the bar higher for myself.
I feel awfully sorry for kids in school these days. Teachers must think everything they write is AI, considering they're still learning to write effectively and probably like to use bullet points, popular phrases like "dive into", and structured layouts that include introduction and conclusion sections.
As another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43105143) notes, some of the author's earlier blog posts use a different style of punctuation so I'm willing to bet that they might be using AI to help them write or reformat some of their ideas. I don't think there's anything wrong with that but without some re-edits to the AI text it will take on that distinctly AI tone.
Kids who are still learning how to write still have a tone/voice/style that comes across in their writing and I think that's the particular distinction being made here.
Given that, it's not surprising that they used an AI to help with translation.
The premise of the article is still interesting.
For some reason I think I would find it less valuable if the idea itself came from an AI, too.
You can also play actual poker like this. Each player writes down random numbers 0-51 in predefined order. You reveal some of those numbers to the other player who adds their own number mod 52 to get their private hand. You all slowly reveal both numbers for shared cards. If one of your cards matches the shared card you have to start over, same deal if at the end multiple players end up with the same cards.
It’s a slow process, but when the goal is wasting time and you don’t have cards it’s a poor substitute.
>Now I can update this blog and push to github, instant deploy !
vs
>I would be delighted to hear from you!
Could you ask a friend/plant to come to a particular station at some time and sit in a specific seat to aid/hinder a set? Gesturing to someone a specific seat is open? How about outright asking someone if they'd be willing to sit in a particular spot?
Other ideas?
As for enticing the desired people, perhaps carry lots of baggage to fill the spaces around you and selectively offer to remove them when people come aboard
— [WikiPedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poker)
I don’t think I would have gone for that definition, but now that I see it, it sums up everything I’ve ever known “Poker” to be. The game is won by comparing cards you have left (meaning that Rummy, Go Fish, or Bridge are different), and there’s a wager about the game (possibly just bragging rights if not playing for money).
I even checked the Wikipedia article about Poker and there is a quote very similar to my wording:
"Other games that use poker hand rankings may likewise be referred to as poker."
Naming things is hard but there's no hard limits for the expansive approach, you can call all card games or all 5-things-games Poker. Your mileage as to communication with other people may vary, though.
Where we're disagreeing is at how we're seeing what's conventional.
You said "you can't call it poker" with a tone of an authority.
And I say that you can.
The actual quote, word for word is "I also don't think this can be called Poker, really."
There is nothing suggesting a tone of authority, on the contrary this is someone explicitly sharing their own opinion on the matter.
This is a misquote, if I ever saw one.
What I've actually written (emphasis added): "I also don't think this can be called Poker, really."
In other words, this is my personal line of thought, with the argument given in the next sentence, and "really" means "to some extent it can, but not to the full".