Adjusting to the GAME!

Pokerstars just released this vid of Acoibra, who is a sponsored online poker pro who started out as an professional Magic of Gathering player.

What I find really interesting is the fact that our species, that is, "humans" if you didn't already know, is obsessed with games! From a completely logical and evolutionary standpoint, there is actually no real reason for us to need to invest so much time to play games, but we do!

There have been a number of Starcraft 2 players who have switched to playing poker, and vice versa. In fact, any professional sportsman is essentially a gamer as well, so its no surprise that they would be interested in other sports, or even other games.

What I really like about games is actually about the way we go about solving a certain problem, and then coming up with a strategy to solve this problem. Then maybe something will happen to the game, such as a rule change or something added/removed, and then another adjustment would have to be made in order to counter this new rule.

Such examples;

Tennis - In 1999, the Tennis federation decided to introduce slightly bigger, heavier balls into their game. The game was very much about serve and volley at the time, which is where a big server would smash the serve as hard as they could and then quickly hit the return on a volley to finish the point off early. This changed the game dramatically as we see today. Serve and volley is almost non existant anymore because the balls are heavier and therefore slower, the effectiveness of this strategy was lowered considerably. So the game has now evolved into favouring big powerful rallys from the back of the court.

Snooker - In 1994, a new miss rule was introduced to the game of Snooker in order to stop players from deliberately making a foul which would put them in an advantageous position. There are some situations where producing a foul would give no advantage to your opponent, and there was no way of knowing whether the player was deliberately trying to do this, so the miss rule was introduced to stop this. This meant that at the referee's discretion, he can judge the attempt of the player and then decide whether it was a good enough attempt at getting out the of the disadvantaged situation otherwise the shot would be replaced back to the same postion before. This is a bit of a backwards example since the adjustment was made due to a flaw in the game.

So for a game such a Starcraft 2 - (yes, I'm harping on about this again =D), the game would every now and then have patches that are introduced from the developers to improve the game. Whether this be making a unit stronger, or having an upgrade cheaper or be done faster, its always interesting on how it will effect the game overall, and the various strategies that will be effected if any at all.

And what about Poker? There have been some interesting things like zoom/rush poker which can effect the strategy. I'd love to try out some poker tournaments where funky stuff goes on. What about skipping a betting round, so that turn and river comes at the same time? What about if for some illogical reason 8th place gets the same as 1st place? It would be funny to see 8 handed every player trying to deliberately lose! How about adding 2 more cards to your hand? Oh wait... that's Omaha! LOL

In all these games, they all last as interesting games because there is the fact that players are constantly adjusting to players. This means that all games are different and therefore has its own kinda reality tv style story to tell, which is why watching sport is so interesting. When the game gets to a stage when everyone is doing the same thing, then there is a problem with the game. It becomes uninteresting. It becomes 2 robots playing against each other perfectly.

I've had some complaints about some calls I made in some games recently. And the reason they are angry with me is because the reg knows that my call is mathematically bad to do in terms of the situation that SNG Wizard calculates for us in this one moment. However, he did not account for the fact that I am willing to readjust to this knowledge, so therefore I made his play bad. However, we can keep going back and forth many times over in that I know that he knows that I know etc continuously if we constantly adjust to each other's play. The fact that I am not willing to lie down and take his "mathematically" sound play according to a computer program means that I am adjusting to his play, which he doesn't like. Using that program as a yes/no answerbook instead of a tool to help you is a dangerous thing indeed.