I indirectly mentioned this last entry, but didn't go into it much. Both the nonmonotonicity and the informational differences mean bluffing is very different in the two games.
Pow Wow first. The first time I played, there was a Poker player playing, and he tended to bluff a lot and screw everyone else up; I forget whether he won or came in second. But while the box labels it as a bluffing game, most of the times I've played, people don't tend to actually bluff very often unless they think they're forced to. You use other people's bids to get an idea of what you think the true number is, then bid under that. Because, well, most of the time you can. It certainly involves a bit of guesswork, but, well, we have continuity.
In Communist Poker, however, because you have so much less information, to some extent the distinction between bluffing and not bluffing disappears. Almost any bid you make will be at least partly speculative (especially if you have no cards at all!). Say a person has 2 aces in hand, and bids 3 aces, hoping someone has a 3rd. Someone else might draw the conclusion that there really *are* 3 aces out there, and go aces over something. Bids of straights are very common in the early game, because they seem pretty easy in the early game, but they suggest a number of cards you don't necessarily have. People put wild guesses into their bids, and then other people take those wild guesses as indicators of what's out there. And, as I wrote last time, the structure of the hand ordering leads by itself to bidding high in each category, which could be considered a mild form of bluffing in itself.
But of course, you can *actually* bluff, too, but not necessarily by bidding *higher* than you think is appropriate as you would in most games - nonmonotonicity means it's not how high you go that matters here - but rather just by naming a hand that is not at all reflective of what you're carrying. It could be very low, but it still serves the function of throwing everyone else off and getting them to challenge each other. And because people have so little information, there's a good chance people will accept it (unless, e.g., they notice you have no cards or didn't look at your hand before opening). This is a big part of the chaos of the game - the things people are bidding often very little, or in the late game, no, relation to reality at all.
-Harry
Pow Wow first. The first time I played, there was a Poker player playing, and he tended to bluff a lot and screw everyone else up; I forget whether he won or came in second. But while the box labels it as a bluffing game, most of the times I've played, people don't tend to actually bluff very often unless they think they're forced to. You use other people's bids to get an idea of what you think the true number is, then bid under that. Because, well, most of the time you can. It certainly involves a bit of guesswork, but, well, we have continuity.
In Communist Poker, however, because you have so much less information, to some extent the distinction between bluffing and not bluffing disappears. Almost any bid you make will be at least partly speculative (especially if you have no cards at all!). Say a person has 2 aces in hand, and bids 3 aces, hoping someone has a 3rd. Someone else might draw the conclusion that there really *are* 3 aces out there, and go aces over something. Bids of straights are very common in the early game, because they seem pretty easy in the early game, but they suggest a number of cards you don't necessarily have. People put wild guesses into their bids, and then other people take those wild guesses as indicators of what's out there. And, as I wrote last time, the structure of the hand ordering leads by itself to bidding high in each category, which could be considered a mild form of bluffing in itself.
But of course, you can *actually* bluff, too, but not necessarily by bidding *higher* than you think is appropriate as you would in most games - nonmonotonicity means it's not how high you go that matters here - but rather just by naming a hand that is not at all reflective of what you're carrying. It could be very low, but it still serves the function of throwing everyone else off and getting them to challenge each other. And because people have so little information, there's a good chance people will accept it (unless, e.g., they notice you have no cards or didn't look at your hand before opening). This is a big part of the chaos of the game - the things people are bidding often very little, or in the late game, no, relation to reality at all.
-Harry
