Poker by Mail
 

Has anyone ever heard of anyone trying something like playing poker by mail, similar to the way some people play chess by mail?

Obviously the logistics would be more complex -- you would need a third party dealer that kept track of who was dealt what cards and so on, but the idea being that in a non-real-time game, you would have as long as you liked to make your decision, to run software simulations, to explore game theory tables, look up detailed notes on how the player has played in similar situations, etc.... basically to do whatever you felt was necessary to come up with the *perfect* play for that particular situation.

I don't think anyone would ever want to play this way for money, as it would be way too susceptible to cheating, but it seems like it might be an interesting approach to learning more about the game, especially if you had the opportunity to play with good players and get their feedback on hands afterwards, etc. (which presumably you would if this was primarily a learning exercise).

You could even automate it by creating a website that handled the deck, dealing, etc. if it turned out to be a valuable tool.

Anyone else think this might be interesting?

Re: Poker by Mail
 

Um, yeah, good luck with that.

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You could even automate it by creating a website that handled the deck, dealing, etc. if it turned out to be a valuable tool.

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Oh definitely. It'd be almost like having one long poker party with your friends. You could name this great invention, "Party Poker".

Re: Poker by Mail
 

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Oh definitely. It'd be almost like having one long poker party with your friends. You could name this great invention, "Party Poker".

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You're missing the point here. The two key differences are that a) you get as long as you want to make your decision, and b) the point is not to play a friendly game of poker against each other, but rather to study the play of poker.

Thanks for your insightful comments though.

Re: Poker by Mail
 

In theory you are right, but since you only play one 20% of the hand you are dealt and a lot of those are mucked quickly, then mailpoker would become slower than paint waiting to dry ... not forgetting, that you have to wait for 8 to 10 players to make there decision (and if one raises, then we need wait another round at least before betting is over)

While mailpoker sound slow, slow and fairly boring, there is one comparison that hold up to chess, you can analyse your plays after the game is over

Run simulations over your handhistories and such

Re: Poker by Mail
 

You mean like an internet discussion forum?

...

Re: Poker by Mail
 

That's true -- trying to play full ring this way would drag out much longer than chess-by-mail. Although it could perhaps still be interesting for analyzing heads-up play because you play almost every hand heads up and there would only be 2 players to wait on, not 8-10.

Re: Poker by Mail
 

Well, what I'm suggesting could actually be done in a forum (like this one), but there would be some differences... Amoung other things I am specifically encouraging doing time-consuming tasks such as computer simulations or game-theory oriented analysis of the situation, and other things which aren't practical to do at the table in a real hand -- and most of the hand history discussions here don't involve those types of things for that very reason -- they aren't practical to do at the table.

I suppose the traditional hand history discussion model is pretty good though and perhaps this doesn't really offer any significant improvement over that.

Re: Poker by Mail
 

I think your idea has some merit from an analytical point of view. It would be best suited for heads-up, though. Three to four players may be interesting, too.

As you say, it would give players the chance to think about their next move, run some simulations, calculate some odds...

Of course, you are missing the visual aspect of the game. It is hard to get a tell on a player half a world away.

In lieu of this, you could keep contact with opponents in another way - taunt them and the such - look for clues.

If the game was played with someone you actually live close to, there could be a period of a day or two when you could try to get a read on them.

This almost sounds like it is getting into another game. I don't know if I could face someone every day and continually pretend I had a monster hand, when I am sitting on 23o.

It could be interesting.

Re: Poker by Mail
 

I found a site that did email poker. No idea what the url was though.

Re: Poker by Mail
 

It could be really interesting if one of us played a table of good non 2+2'ers (heads up or multiway) and we would debate and vote about the correct actions.

Re: Poker by Mail
 

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I found a site that did email poker. No idea what the url was though.

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I google'd for something like that but only found one offhanded mention in a mail archive and no actual site. If anyone comes up with anything, please post it. In the meantime if I have any free time I may take a shot at coding something up... I've been looking for en excuse to learn Ruby on Rails.

Re: Poker by Mail
 

First of all, there is a secure way to do this. There are computer algorithms that allow you to shuffle a deck on your computer, and then encrypt the results so that another person can reshuffle it without knowing which card is where. That person can pass the deck back to you and you can decrypt it to find only your cards.

The logistics of this would be impractical for poker by mail, but it could be done.

I think the solution to the speed problem is to play many hands at once. The organizer deals 500 hands of poker and sends each of 50 people 10 starting hands with them under the gun. When they reply with their decisions, she sends everyone 10 hands with them second-to-act, listing what the under the gun player did.

Each hand is played with a different selection of nine other players from the 50. People who don't reply on time could be replaced by substitutes (otherwise too many hands would be ruined, folding a late responder distorts the hand too much).

Day 1, you get 10 UTG hands; which you send back. Day 4 or so, you get 10 second-to-act hands. On day 36 or so, you get the second decision on your Day 1 UTG hands (except the ones you folded). As time continues, you get out of sync (you might get a letter with hands you started on lots of different days, depending on how many people stayed in and how many raises they made). The hands play faster near showdown because there are fewer players.

The organizer could keep adding new hands, so fourth day or so you got a letter with ten hands, some old, some new.

Re: Poker by Mail
 

It occurs to me that you could play each hand many times. If you got 50 people, you could play each hand at five tables of 10 each. Then you could compare your results to other people's in the same situation, like duplicate bridge.

Re: Poker by Mail
 

That Penn Jillete book about cheating your friends at poker talks about poker-by-mail at one point. Needless to say that's probably not what you were looking for though.

Re: Poker by Mail
 

Yawn.

Re: Poker by Mail
 

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I found a site that did email poker. No idea what the url was though.

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Doesn't RGP have some huge tournament?

Re: Poker by Mail
 

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You're missing the point here. The two key differences are that a) you get as long as you want to make your decision, and b) the point is not to play a friendly game of poker against each other, but rather to study the play of poker.

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I didn't miss the point. The idea of doing it by mail is ridiculous. The majority of decisions are fairly obvious and the amount of time to communicate is absurd when you consider we're living in the Internet age. Let alone this could've been done 50 years ago instaneously with phones and a mutual friend.

If you want to study the play of poker, experience is massively important, and I don't see how your idea provides much improvement over post-hand analysis.

If you want to be able to play poker with friends on an infinite time bank, just use one of the bajillion private poker clients availible on the net. Most are free and even open source and it won't take you a month to play a trivial hand.

I'm sorry if it's insulting, but this is just one of the most ridiculous ideas I've seen in a long time.

Re: Poker by Mail
 

interesting idea but silly in poker

Re: Poker by Mail
 

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I found a site that did email poker. No idea what the url was though.

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Doesn't RGP have some huge tournament?

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Yes, they've been doing it for a while now.

Link

Re: Poker by Mail
 

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I didn't miss the point. The idea of doing it by mail is ridiculous.

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It may very well be the case that playing poker by mail is ridiculous, but you the reason I said you missed the point is because you implied that if you took my idea to it's logical conclusion, it would be Party Poker. Whether or not you think the idea is any good, if you believe that, you missed the point I was trying to make -- specifically that doing this would enable to you get into a level of analysis on hands that you cannot acheive playing real poker.

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The majority of decisions are fairly obvious and the amount of time to communicate is absurd when you consider we're living in the Internet age.

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Your point about the majority of decisions being fairly obvious is a good one -- perhaps it would make more sense to only undergo this excercise with pre-arranged hands to study how different players would play them, or with hands that have already been played (e.g. hands that get posted on here) but where the people playing them out are not the original players (and obviously aren't already familiar with the hands).

As for the speed of communication in the internet age, that could be mitigated by using a different format than actual snail mail -- I think I already suggested e-mail in my original post, which would be orders of magnitude better than snail mail... and it could actually be instant messanger based too, where for the obvious decisions the hand would play very quickly, but then you get as long as you like for the less obvious ones. It could also just be a poker-site interface like party poker which is real time but with no time constraints -- which is basically what you suggest later.

Although one problem occurs to me in using something real-time but without time constraints, which is that if most of the decisions are fairly trivial and happen instantly, then suddenly you take a very long time to reply because you are running simulations, etc. that would essentially become a tell -- whereas if you were actually doing it by postal mail, or even email, or perhaps a site that acted as an intermediary, then there would be a minimum delay and limit this problem somewhat.

Of course the other idea that was posted later in the thread where you send out a bunch of hands at once might help too -- if you did that and basically put a 24 hr (or 48 or 72 or whatever) time limit on it, then posted the next stage of the hand every 24+1 hrs, (or 48+1, etc) that would eliminate any chance of time based tells.

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If you want to study the play of poker, experience is massively important, and I don't see how your idea provides much improvement over post-hand analysis.

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I agree with you that actual play and experience are essential for becomming a better player, and as I acknowledged in a later post, I guess perhaps this idea does not provide too much improvement, but the thing that originally got me thinking about this was a book on game theory I was reading that had a section where discussed a mechanism for finding pareto-optimal equilibriums in complex situations which while not directly applicable to poker, made me start thinking about how you could do a thorough analysis of a hand at each step through the hand if you only had enough time... (perhaps ala Harrington's SHAL) which got me wondering how often doing an analysis like that in the middle of a hand would lead to a surprising decision... the answer may be rarely or never... but I thought that if the results were surprising even occasionally that it might be interesting to try to find a way to structure a game of poker in such a way that doing these types of in-depth analyses would be the norm rather than the exception.

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If you want to be able to play poker with friends on an infinite time bank, just use one of the bajillion private poker clients availible on the net. Most are free and even open source and it won't take you a month to play a trivial hand.

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I'm not interesting playing on an infinite time bank just for the sake of playing, but this is actually a good idea for how to do the original idea.

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I'm sorry if it's insulting, but this is just one of the most ridiculous ideas I've seen in a long time.

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I don't find it insulting -- I was just throwing out an idea to see if anyone else found it interesting or not... if you think it's ridiculous, that's cool, you are entitled to have that opinion, and if you had just said "this is the stupidiest most ridiculous thing I've heard in a long time" I wouldn't even have responded, but in the sarcastic comment about calling it party poker it actually seemed that you had missed the point, so I just tried to clear up what I what I thought you had missed.

Initially I also thought that it was kind of pointless to reply if you were just going to be negative, but I subsequently realized that "this is a stupid idea" feedback is valuable as well... and now after this post I'm actually glad you replied because your subsequent re-reply actually contained some constructive ideas and thoughts that contributed value to the thread.

As an aside I don't know whether to point to the RGP stuff as evidence that my idea is actually valuable, or that you're right and it's ridiculous [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Re: Poker by Mail
 

Here's another link for the current WRGPT:

WRGPT 15

If you cruise around the site, you'll find the table histories. Clicking on the hand numbers will show how the hands played out.

Re: Poker by Mail
 

interesting idea!

maybe try doing on the forum? have a trusted person with a deck shuffler PM everyone their HOLE cards, and then post he flop in the thread, or something....