Let's play a variation on poker! Like all the decent games of poker, this will be a lot about leveraging luck with strategy and mind games; a perfect match for a place about predictions imo.
We're gonna play a variation based on Texas Hold 'Em specially designed for working on Manifold over a series of markets, but everyone can participate and bet even if they're not given a hand. If y'all love it, we'll do more hands. Here's how it will work:
This market is the buy in for the hand. Every bettor with a position of at least 20 mana at close (YES and NO are equally fine) will be given a hand, though if there are a lot of you I'll limit it to the top 8 positions at close and might close early to get things moving (I'll let you know a bit ahead of time if I do). Bots and alts are allowed, but I'll need a way to contact you to give you your hand, such as discord, and I'll need to be told if a bot-tagged account wants a hand ahead of time. If you're betting and don't want a hand, also let me know. Then this market will resolve PROB to the market's current value.
You're welcome to share your hand, or bluff, obfuscate, and misdirect, whether on the markets, over discord, or wherever you see fit. You're also welcome to bet on your opponents! (Such bets have no bearing on if your hand continues)
Once everyone has their hand, we'll have short multi-choice markets for each of the four rounds of betting (Hand, Flop, Turn, and River), where everyone on Manifold can bet on players in the round.
On the Hand, Flop, and Turn markets, the 6/4/2 players, respectively, who have the highest YES positions (minimum 20) on themselves at close advance to the next round. Everyone else is considered "folded". Those markets will resolve at the end of the game to the final winner.
Finally, if we get to the River market with 2 players standing, they have a last chance to fold or settle in for the showdown. The minimum position to stay in at this point is 50, and if both players stick it out to market close I'll reveal their hands, announce the winner, and resolve all the markets accordingly.
If for whatever reason every player folds at any stage, the win goes to the player who held the highest YES self-position on the previous round.
And as a bonus for this first trial run, I'll award 100 mana to the winner (if the game ends in any market after this one). Congrats to them!
As you might have noticed, the rules of this special variant allow for mismatched bets by players, so feel free to jump in even if you're intimidated by a whale in the market! They can do their thing, profit by playing market dynamics, and you can still come out on top :) Admins and Manifold staff also have no inherent advantage, so don't be shy!
As I'll know all of the cards, I won't be betting or playing, and I cannot be bribed to reveal other players' information or tilt in your favor. My house cut is simply the (hopefully ample) trader bonuses on any markets I make for this, though I'll accept tips for my role as dealer if you're so inclined.
Of course, side markets are welcome. Feel free to add them to the Manifold Plays Poker group for visibility.
1,000🏅 Top traders
| # | Trader | Total profit |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ṁ1,783 | |
| 2 | Ṁ549 | |
| 3 | Ṁ308 | |
| 4 | Ṁ88 | |
| 5 | Ṁ12 |
Congrats to the 8 players! I'll be reaching out to you with your hand over discord, if listed (so that's only @Sinclair, and @ChristopherRandles who already reached out). The rest of you can reach out to me at @Stralor on discord or manifoldpoker@patrick-scott.com to get your hands (attn: @A @SimonGrayson @Fion @KongoLandwalker @brubsby @ManualBlinking)
@Stralor Here's the next market! https://manifold.markets/Stralor/manifold-plays-poker-hand-bets-hand?r=U3RyYWxvcg
@ManualBlinking I still haven't heard from you. Need me to reach out to give you a hand some other way?
@NamesAreHard i was too enthralled by the snipe war that i forgot to actually ensure i was in the top 8 of positions held lol, so i thank you
@ChristopherRandles I wasn't going to participate here but betting it under 10% was too good of a deal to pass up, it was just free money for me unless someone was watching the market with more than 400k mana balance and willing to risk it on a less than a minute notice.
By my count there are currently 10 people vying for the 8 available hands! I'm sure trading will get more intense as people jockey for both position and market profits once we get near the end of this phase.
I don't feel this needs adding to the description but you might want to know; in case of a tie in the UI, I'll do the following steps in order until I've got a set of 8 players:
I assume the positions in the UI are ordered top-to-bottom including fractional shares on each side, so I'll use that if possible and if the tie is only on one of the sides
(I don't intend to test or disprove that assumption, and tbh I'm also totally happy if it's sorted by earliest bet)
Then I'll try to break the tie by looking at the precise positions via the API 😔
Finally, if somehow the API says the two tied people fighting for the 8th hand with the same value in the UI and the highest ordering on their side each have exactly the same shares, I will stretch the seats to 9 players. This won't cause any adjustment to the number of players who advance in the later rounds
These are simply a failsafe for fairness. I don't expect (or want) to need to do them
This looks like fun! The only part of the rules which I think you might want to consider tweaking for future hands is the rule about how many players can get to the flop, turn and river - if more than two players are prepared to bet over a certain amount on themselves then they should be allowed to get to the river rather than it being limited to two!
And because I love a meta-market... Will the limit of only eight seats lead to a bidding war for those seats?
(I couldn't add this to the Manifold Plays Poker group either - definitely some kind of bug there)
@SimonGrayson Yeah I might adjust after we see how it goes! The forced paring intuitively feels necessary to encourage some bidding wars on the hand, flop, and turn markets, since otherwise the only incentive to bid more on yourself is profit instead of competition to continue, as the bets don't need to be matched 1-to-1. Maybe we'll see a higher threshold where players ought to be allowed to continue regardless, but I'm hoping the rules as-is give a shot for both heated face-offs and the possibility of wins by minnows
Based on the convo below with @NamesAreHard several hours ago, I've adjusted the rules slightly for how the game's later markets will resolve. None of the changes affect this market directly. They should make for a more fair and interesting game overall, however. The changes:
All the game's markets other than this one will resolve to the winner of the whole hand, rather than to each player who progresses. This should put it more in line with winning a poker hand and avoid some exploits.
Each player's self-position in the markets after this one needs to be in YES shares to advance. Previously I allowed either YES or NO, but that only made sense while the markets resolved to everyone who advanced.
I've added a tie-breaker rule for the possibility that everyone folds in a round. In such a case, the player who held the highest self-position on the previous round wins the hand.
Hopefully these all make a bunch of sense and are agreeable :)
So if I understand correctly, the actual hand only matters for the resolution of the river market? I'd suggest resolving each of the previous markets only to the hand winner, otherwise they are just a series of whalebait/sniping markets with no relation to the hand at all (people can simply choose not to participate in the river market if their hand is trash). There would still be sniping dynamics even if the resolution was based on the hand winner but at least there would be that to consider :) Can't think of any good and simple fixes to that right now, poker has betting rounds for a reason :D
Also there's the incentive for participants to bet NO on themselves whenever they decide to "fold" which skews things - both because it limits their risk/losses and because if spectators bet a lot on them, they can end up in a situation where the most profitable thing to do is simply to bet NO all the way down and fold even if they have a decent hand. Maybe a rule can be added that participants can only buy YES?
A third thing is that you can't really apply any pressure to other people in the hand if the rule for who continues on is based on simply who has the most shares without any relative comparisons. So even if I bet myself up to 95% (or hold 95% of all shares held by participants) and everyone else is at 1-2%, they still get to continue in the hand. Also you simply have to bet 50 mana on the river to get to showdown and there's nothing the other person can do about it. Maybe all of that is intended, though, so that we actually get some action and people don't just fold all the time.
@NamesAreHard Interesting points! Hmm, definitely intended to go to showdowns more often than not, though you're right that there needs to be a consideration of your hand at each stage.
I hear you about the NO thing. but under these rules, they'd only be hurting themselves when their shares get them picked and they don't fold because they bought NO.
I am worried about sniping, but then again that's a part of poker; there is an advantage to scaring other people out, and opting out of a hand at any point is definitely part of the game. But I think you're right, there's something elegant to resolving only to the winner after all of the markets, and that doesn't conflict with the paring down based on self-bet size. I do like the idea of each market being it's own game, though, so I'll chew on it some more and might come back tomorrow and edit that part of the rules since we haven't started the hand yet.
@Stralor 🤔 ... and nothing would prevent any of us from making similar snipe markets about "who progresses" that resolve to multiple but still allow the main thread to continue with only the winners chosen. yeah, the more I think about this the more I like it. I'll change it tomorrow after I sleep on it and if nothing else makes me reconsider
@Stralor thanks for bouncing these ideas off me! definitely worth sorting this out earlier than later, even for a first trial
@Stralor One thing I haven't resolved is the possible case that can happen here and not in a real game of Texas Hold 'Em: maybe everyone folds at some stage. I guess I'll just have to have a "no one wins" option
I hear you about the NO thing. but under these rules, they'd only be hurting themselves when their shares get them picked and they don't fold because they bought NO.
So it's based on all bought YES shares? Because the rules said position at market close and you sell all your YES shares if you bet a bunch of NO :) That might work fine, even though there's the option to count on other players to buy some more YES shares to kick you out of the next round as is their incentive and then you win.
One thing I haven't resolved is the possible case that can happen here and not in a real game of Texas Hold 'Em: maybe everyone folds at some stage.
I think this will happen rarely because if everyone else is folding, then you just bet with whatever hand at the last second and win the market :D Maybe you can just take the player with highest amount of shares from the previous round as the winner in the case where everyone folds, incentives seem to work out fine.
So it's based on all bought YES shares? Because the rules said position at market close and you sell all your YES shares if you bet a bunch of NO :) That would work fine, yeah.
it's based on all shares on yourself, YES or NO. but the incentive to only bet YES on yourself to continue doesn't work if it switches to winner-takes-all, since then you'd bet NO to continue to the next hand even when you know you'd lose. so I think the way it's written is dependent on the present "each market resolves to the participants of the next round" system, so it'll have to change, too, yeah
Maybe you can just take the player with highest amount of shares from the previous round as the winner in the case where everyone folds, incentives seem to work out fine.
I like that! Definitely saves me on market creation costs 😂
@Stralor Oh, I see, so "highest position" on themselves is meant to be the absolute value. It would be nice to clarify this if you keep it in some way because for some reason I thought "highest" was referring to the largest amount of YES shares, the NO ones being negative in my mind.