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Old 10-26-2005, 08:11 PM
AaronBrown AaronBrown is offline
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: New York
Posts: 505
Default Long Post: Poker-Flavored Sweepstakes

This is a long post, asking for comments and suggestions about a Poker-flavored sweepstakes game.

The game will be played on a three-day business cruise for senior financial executives, there are no other passengers aboard. The players really work during the day at training sessions, lectures and presentations, but at night they gamble, dance, drink or use the other facilities of the cruise ship. Some will be Poker players, most will have some idea of the game, some will know nothing. I'm trying to come up with a fun game for all three types. It cannot require Poker knowledge to play, but that knowledge should give some advantage, so people will discuss the game with each other and ask for help. The prize is a home entertainment system, nominally valued at $10,000 (but you could probably pick something similar up at Circuit City for $3,999), with some iPod minis as second prizes. There will be about 300 players.

My idea is to distribute a sheet with all 169 starting hold'em hands on it and ask people to pick three. At the casino after the first full day of the cruise we deal a ten-handed game of hold'em. Anyone who picked one of the hands dealt participates. Some people will have more than one hand, either because they picked more than one of the ten, or because one hand (like Jack/Nine offsuit) came up more than once. We let people think about it for a bit, then deal the flop, pause, turn, pause, river. Anyone who picked the winning hand becomes a semi-finalist and gets an iPod.

The next night, we gather the semi-finalists (or their representatives if they prefer to nominate someone who knows more about Poker) and let them draft the 169 hands. Therefore, each of the possible hands is owned by one semi-finalist, and each semi-finalist owns 169/N hands (where N is the number of semi-finalists). We have another deal and award the grand prize. The idea is most people will know or run into a semi-finalist, so people who like this kind of thing will break into groups to discuss strategy during the second day.

One problem is that the winning hand from the first day might be owned by nobody. To solve that, I'll make the choices for the people who don't return the sheet (there will be many) to make sure every hand is covered by at least three people (so we have semi-finalists). Another problem is that over 100 people are likely to pick AA and other strong hands, despite the fact that they will have so many co-semi-finalists if they win. Here the solution is to have a prelottery for any hand picked by more than 10 people, to select the 10 who actually get to own it. Before the hand is dealt, I'll distribute a sheet with the owners of each hand, so people can see if they won the prelottery or not.

Another problem is we could have a tie, or even something like a straight on the board with a 10-way tie. One solution would be to redeal the board in case of a tie, but an easier one is to predeal the hand (secretly of course) and keep dealing until we get one that has no ties (and, ideally, hope for several hands until the river card). Then we can stack the deck to produce the desired outcome. On the other hand, maybe ties would add to the suspense and people wouldn't mind a redeal. A predeal would violate gaming regulations which is no trouble for the sweepstakes, but would prevent the casino from taking cash sidebets. In a redeal, I think I'd redeal the board for everyone if anyone tied, rather than just having a playoff among the tied hands.

Any comments or suggestions? How would you play this game, given that the number of people owning a hand is floored at 3 and capped at 10?
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