I brought Pow Wow with me to mathclub social hour today, but I ended up instead playing Communist Poker, an interestingly similar game.
The rules are as follows: It's played with an ordinary deck of cards. Each player is initially dealt 5 cards, which are kept secret; someone goes first. You go around bidding poker hands[0] (other than flushes; see footnote for more details). On your turn, you must either raise the bid or challenge the person who just went (hey, just like in Pow Wow).
When someone is challenged, everyone reveals their hands, and if the hand bid can be made using everyone's cards, the challenge fails; if it can't, the challenge succeeds. The challenger or the person challenged then loses the round depending on whether the challenge succeeded, and a new round begins, but the loser is dealt one less card this time around. Whoever made the challenge, regardless of whether it succeeded, starts the new round.
When a player is down to 0 cards, he is still in; but if he loses a round at 0, then he's out. However, there is one way to gain a card - if you're down at 0, and you win a challenge (either correctly challenging or incorrectly being challenged), you go back up to 1. Last one left wins.
So the basic structure and rules are very similar to Pow Wow, but there are some interesting differences. Let's go from less important/more obvious to more important/less obvious.
1. You can gain back position if you're at 0. This is not very important, really. Another unimportant difference: Who starts the next round.
2. As you lose rounds, you lose more and more information; you can even have no information at all. This latter is an interesting difference from Pow Wow; however, the effect of successively losing information is small compared to the effect of not having nearly as much information as you do in Pow Wow in the first place.
3. Monotonicity. This is a big one. Pow Wow has a monotonicity property - you're trying to bid less than or equal to the sum, so if a bid is safe, so is any lower one. This is not true in Communist Poker! The presence of three aces does not imply the presence of 3 kings. You might also say that Pow Wow has something of a "continuity" property as well; similar bids, i.e. ones that are satisfied under similar conditions, are close in rank (and indeed, their distance corresponds pretty directly to their similarity). Not true in Communist Poker! 3 aces is similar to 2 aces, but there's the whole spectrum of 2 pairs bids, and 3-of-something-other-than-aces bids, inbetween, but all are less similar to 2 aces than 3 aces is. (By my evaluation, anyway; but the 3-of-a-kinds, certainly so.) Indeed, due to the way poker hands are ranked, the most similar hands are often found by skipping quickly up the ranks.
4. You see your own hand and everyone else's is secret, rather than vice versa. Simple but important.
So, differences 3 and 4 being the important ones: What are the effects of these on play?
Basically, things are much more chaotic. You're going on much less information, and are encouraged to raise bids by a lot rather than a little. The fact that you're going on much less information means you're encouraged to just make stuff up - and then other people are encouraged to follow it, having little else to go on.
But here's an unexpected effect - high cards matter more than low cards. It doesn't seem like this should be so, but it is. Why does this happen? Well, the non-continuity encourages going up rapidly; but jumping to the next category can be risky. Hence, bids tend to concentrated around the high bids in each category. Bidding the highest of a category forces the next person to switch category or challenge; due to the way poker hands are ranked, with full house immediately above straight (there are no flushes, remember), the 10-A straight bid is a common one for forcing the next player to somehow screw himself. Of course, this gets much less so as the game goes on, and the types of bids drop with the number of cards; at very low numbers, the high-card importance effect reduces too, as people are concentrated on the exact cards; however, the chaoticness - the exact cards matter but you don't know them - does still preserve this some.
So, Communist Poker is fun, but it seems pretty hard to get much of a handle on, with its nonmonotonicity and discontinuity. I think I like Pow Wow better. (Although, another effect of having much less to go on in Communist Poker is that people don't take as long bidding - except that another effect is that they spend more time asking what the previous bids were, as not only are they the main source of information, but also, due to the nonmonotonicity, their exact nature matters quite a bit!)
-Harry
[0]Exactly how this works: You must bid the specific relevant part of the hand. So if you bid, e.g., a full house, you have to specify, what over what. But if you bid 2 pair, you specify what 2 pairs - the notional 5th card is irrelevant and is not considered in determining a match - so e.g. if there are only 5 cards, 3 aces and 2 10s, then "aces and 10s" counts, even though in fact the only 5-card hand you could make with them would not be a two-pairs (exact hand matters in this game, as you'll see if you keep reading). And as the game goes on eventually there won't even be a full 5 cards, so it kind of has to work this way. Similarly with other hands that do not use the full 5, including a single card.
You cannot bid flushes, because they're too easy. Straight flushes are OK, but we're not really sure how they should work - should you have to name the suit? This hasn't actually come up, it seems. I'm thinking the answer should be no, because a person has no way to get suit information other than looking at their own hand. Also, Grant points out that suits aren't ranked in Poker, though that can easily be fixed by either A. picking a ranking (e.g. Bridge order) or B. simply saying you must go strictly higher.
The rules are as follows: It's played with an ordinary deck of cards. Each player is initially dealt 5 cards, which are kept secret; someone goes first. You go around bidding poker hands[0] (other than flushes; see footnote for more details). On your turn, you must either raise the bid or challenge the person who just went (hey, just like in Pow Wow).
When someone is challenged, everyone reveals their hands, and if the hand bid can be made using everyone's cards, the challenge fails; if it can't, the challenge succeeds. The challenger or the person challenged then loses the round depending on whether the challenge succeeded, and a new round begins, but the loser is dealt one less card this time around. Whoever made the challenge, regardless of whether it succeeded, starts the new round.
When a player is down to 0 cards, he is still in; but if he loses a round at 0, then he's out. However, there is one way to gain a card - if you're down at 0, and you win a challenge (either correctly challenging or incorrectly being challenged), you go back up to 1. Last one left wins.
So the basic structure and rules are very similar to Pow Wow, but there are some interesting differences. Let's go from less important/more obvious to more important/less obvious.
1. You can gain back position if you're at 0. This is not very important, really. Another unimportant difference: Who starts the next round.
2. As you lose rounds, you lose more and more information; you can even have no information at all. This latter is an interesting difference from Pow Wow; however, the effect of successively losing information is small compared to the effect of not having nearly as much information as you do in Pow Wow in the first place.
3. Monotonicity. This is a big one. Pow Wow has a monotonicity property - you're trying to bid less than or equal to the sum, so if a bid is safe, so is any lower one. This is not true in Communist Poker! The presence of three aces does not imply the presence of 3 kings. You might also say that Pow Wow has something of a "continuity" property as well; similar bids, i.e. ones that are satisfied under similar conditions, are close in rank (and indeed, their distance corresponds pretty directly to their similarity). Not true in Communist Poker! 3 aces is similar to 2 aces, but there's the whole spectrum of 2 pairs bids, and 3-of-something-other-than-aces bids, inbetween, but all are less similar to 2 aces than 3 aces is. (By my evaluation, anyway; but the 3-of-a-kinds, certainly so.) Indeed, due to the way poker hands are ranked, the most similar hands are often found by skipping quickly up the ranks.
4. You see your own hand and everyone else's is secret, rather than vice versa. Simple but important.
So, differences 3 and 4 being the important ones: What are the effects of these on play?
Basically, things are much more chaotic. You're going on much less information, and are encouraged to raise bids by a lot rather than a little. The fact that you're going on much less information means you're encouraged to just make stuff up - and then other people are encouraged to follow it, having little else to go on.
But here's an unexpected effect - high cards matter more than low cards. It doesn't seem like this should be so, but it is. Why does this happen? Well, the non-continuity encourages going up rapidly; but jumping to the next category can be risky. Hence, bids tend to concentrated around the high bids in each category. Bidding the highest of a category forces the next person to switch category or challenge; due to the way poker hands are ranked, with full house immediately above straight (there are no flushes, remember), the 10-A straight bid is a common one for forcing the next player to somehow screw himself. Of course, this gets much less so as the game goes on, and the types of bids drop with the number of cards; at very low numbers, the high-card importance effect reduces too, as people are concentrated on the exact cards; however, the chaoticness - the exact cards matter but you don't know them - does still preserve this some.
So, Communist Poker is fun, but it seems pretty hard to get much of a handle on, with its nonmonotonicity and discontinuity. I think I like Pow Wow better. (Although, another effect of having much less to go on in Communist Poker is that people don't take as long bidding - except that another effect is that they spend more time asking what the previous bids were, as not only are they the main source of information, but also, due to the nonmonotonicity, their exact nature matters quite a bit!)
-Harry
[0]Exactly how this works: You must bid the specific relevant part of the hand. So if you bid, e.g., a full house, you have to specify, what over what. But if you bid 2 pair, you specify what 2 pairs - the notional 5th card is irrelevant and is not considered in determining a match - so e.g. if there are only 5 cards, 3 aces and 2 10s, then "aces and 10s" counts, even though in fact the only 5-card hand you could make with them would not be a two-pairs (exact hand matters in this game, as you'll see if you keep reading). And as the game goes on eventually there won't even be a full 5 cards, so it kind of has to work this way. Similarly with other hands that do not use the full 5, including a single card.
You cannot bid flushes, because they're too easy. Straight flushes are OK, but we're not really sure how they should work - should you have to name the suit? This hasn't actually come up, it seems. I'm thinking the answer should be no, because a person has no way to get suit information other than looking at their own hand. Also, Grant points out that suits aren't ranked in Poker, though that can easily be fixed by either A. picking a ranking (e.g. Bridge order) or B. simply saying you must go strictly higher.
