Duplicate Poker

[gsyme]

I was toying with the idea of a poker variant that somehow eliminates luck (and, as a bonus, would be legal in the state of Illinois). The obvious solution would be some form of duplicate poker. A simple version of this would be: teams of two would play heads-up against each other, and each game would play the same set of hands, but with the position switched.

I.e. if, at table one, team 1 gets AA and team 2 gets KK, at table 2 team 1 gets KK and team 2 gets AA. Suppose the flop comes AKK at table 1--then it would come that way at table 2, too. This is a rather silly example, but it does show how luck would be significantly reduced, in that, after the smoke clears, a lot of money will be lost and gained for both teams at both tables.

Implementing this would be a PITA, and the best solution I could come up with is to get a bunch of index cards, bundle them into matching sets, and write poker hands on them. Or I could write a simple Java program to print out poker hands onto perforated card paper. After, say, 20 hands, the two tables can exchange index cards and play the hands the other table got. Obviously this requires a lot of set-up, but if a big tournament were held, one can just rotate the "decks" among the players and not have to use as many.

Second problem is the scoring. Assuming it's no-limit, how would that work? If people just got one stack of 100 blinds or so you're going to get a lot of ties when one player wins it all on each team.