Ladies' Poker Night

[Heritage]

Reading over the old Upstairs at Monty's poker thread made me nostalgic, and a few people in the chat seemed interested, so anyone want to play a few hands of Texas hold 'em? An all ladies game seemed like a fun change.

Grim, a casual player who tends to lose money but still has a good time, would start spreading the word among the hero community; we can play wherever folks feel comfortable. As far as poker simulation goes, Airoo suggested the following in chat:

(00:18:13) Aoiroo: Well, than 2d4;2d14 for texas holdem set up, first is suit, one through ten on the second is number cards, 11-13 face cards, 14 A.

(00:19:49) Aoiroo: So, 1=hearts, 2=spades, 3=clubs, 4=diamonds.

Though this could lead to hands being duplicated; I shuffled an actual deck and sent PM's to players last time. Regardless I don't think we should kill a charming thread idea by overthinking the simulation aspect.

So who's game for a game?

[Aoiroo]

Up for Carrie for this thread, though she might attend as Sil.

[Azuth65]

Wisp would be interested, assuming Grim is fine with a 16-year old being part of the game.

[Fox]

Dragonfly (as Dragonfly, or as Mara if Jill O'Cure attends) might be interested. As social things go it's relatively low-key, she's been told a little about Grim, and it's a good chance to apply her studies in Sense Motive.

[Gizmo]

If it's to be at the brownstone, there's no reason for Ellie not to be there, really! Regardless, it's not hard to imagine Lynn dragging her along wherever it is.

[Heritage]

The Brownstone is indeed a great place to hang out, if folks don't mind, and Grim seems to invite people there at the drop of a hat. We can play elsewhere, though, if that works better for others.

[April]

I wouldn't mind if people don't mind playing poker with a mind reader :D

[quotemyname]

I'll throw Blueshift in on this, if possible. She's pretty Well Informed, so she might find out about it

If it's already full, and being held at the Brownstone, maybe I could have Colt make a Cameo?

I like the rolling, as it's faster than shuffling. Re-rolling is an easy way to get around dupes. I say we "sit" in initiative order, and roll in that order, people that pull duplicate hands will just have to roll until they get hands that work.

[Fox]

I'm honestly in favor of using an actual deck, myself. Rolling's faster, but not really simpler, and the duplicates are going to start piling up - and cause confusion if they get missed.

Math time!* Assuming everyone has a two-card hand and there are five cards face-up on the table (standard Texas Hold 'em): if there are four players and everyone rolls up their cards, there's something like an 80% chance there's a duplicate in play. With five or six interested people so far, it goes up to around 90% - meaning that there's a nine in ten chance there's at least one duplicate somewhere in play. That's a lot of duplicates, which means a lot of rerolling (only once they're caught!), and a lot of rerolling means a lot of delays. Plus, using an actual deck and PMs provides the advantage of keeping hands secret, but verifiable.

*Man it's been a long time since I did card-based statistics, and I haven't played much poker. Showing my work in case it needs correcting:

52 cards in a deck; for any given, complete hand in a game with n players, there are [2n + 5] cards in play - two cards per player, and five cards on the table. Ideally, every one of these cards would be unique, thus a duplicate occurs when they are NOT all unique.

The odds of all cards being unique is: 52/52 * 51/52 * 50/52 * 49/52 * 48/52 * 47/52 * 46/52 * 45/52 * 44/52 * .....

That is, the first card could be anything, the second card could be anything but that first card (any of the 51 remaining cards), the third card could be any but those first two (any of the 50 remaining cards), etc, and there are 2n+5 cards comprising the five community cards, the first player's hand, the second player's hand, and so on until there are no more players.

So if those're the odds of all hands being UNIQUE, the odds of them being NOT UNIQUE are 1 - (52/52 * 51/52 * 50/52 * 49/52.....), simplified to 1 - ((52*51*50*49*48...)/(52²ⁿ⁺⁵)). There's probably a tricky way to reduce this to a much more clean-looking factorial, but I can't be bothered. Assuming I crunched numbers correctly, a four-person game has the following:

1 - ((52*51*50*49*48*47*46*45*44*43*42*41*40)/(52¹³)) =

1 - (0.194544899) =

~= 0.805 ~= 80.5% chance of at least one duplicate in play.

And, for a five-person game:

1 - ((52*51*50*49*48*47*46*45*44*43*42*41*40*39*38)/(52¹⁵)) =

1 - (0.10662557) =

~= 0.893 ~= 89.3% chance of at least one duplicate in play.

[Heritage]

Okay, so far we've got:

Grim

Silhouette

Wisp

Dragonfly

Jill O' Cure

If others can vouch for her, Grim would be fine with Sage as long as her powers are explained; no one should be using their powers to influence play anyway, since really all heroes could abuse them somehow or other.

I'd be fine with Colt popping in his head if we play at the Brownstone, but for variety's sake and not to crowd the table I'd prefer not to have Blueshift; Grim and her will have to thread sometimes soon, though!

Does six players work for everyone? With young 'ens present we might want to go cashless and merely play for chips, and it can't be on a school night ;)

[quotemyname]

Fine by me. Let me know when the thread is up, and I'll pop in at the opportune moment.

[Aoiroo]

Okay, so far we've got:

Grim

Silhouette

Wisp

Dragonfly

Jill O' Cure

If others can vouch for her, Grim would be fine with Sage as long as her powers are explained; no one should be using their powers to influence play anyway, since really all heroes could abuse them somehow or other.

I'd be fine with Colt popping in his head if we play at the Brownstone, but for variety's sake and not to crowd the table I'd prefer not to have Blueshift; Grim and her will have to thread sometimes soon, though!

Does six players work for everyone? With young 'ens present we might want to go cashless and merely play for chips, and it can't be on a school night

Six players sounds fine.

[Fox]

Sounds good to me.

[Azuth65]

Works for me.

Wisp: *grabs her StarCraft 2 poker set*

[Heritage]

And we're off!

IC

OOC

[Heritage]

Just a heads up that Fusion will be joining us as well; AA expressed interest in the chat but missed this thread :oops: