Current Status
River! Head-to-Head, Fion vs. A
3 of diamonds, 3 of spades, 4 of diamonds, 8 of clubs, + 8 of spades
Round wagers:
The Audience Hand
The Audience has been eliminated!
5 of hearts, Jack of spades
What's this all about?
We're playing 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. 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.
Here's how it works:
Players who get a hand are welcome to share it, or bluff, obfuscate, and misdirect, whether on the questions, over discord, or wherever they see fit. They're also welcome to bet for or against their opponents! (Such bets have no bearing on if their hand advances¹)
The Audience Hand works exactly like personal hands, except it:
is publicly visible
doesn't have to buy in
uses the net YES minus NO shares of all bettors in its question as its wager
(¹ betting on this opponent can affect whether a player's hand folds or not, due to the advancement rules)
There are multiple betting rounds for each phase of play (Hand dealt, Flop, Turn, River), for which each player has their own binary question. These questions are rapid, each round will only last about a day. I will close the River by hand at an undetermined time to avoid snipe eliminations.
Each player must hold a certain amount of YES shares on their own Hand, Flop, Turn, and River questions at close of the betting round to have a chance to advance to the next stage. This self-position is called their "wager".
The player with the 4th/3rd/2nd/1st highest wager in the round is called the Pivot Player (Hand/Flop/Turn/River). If the player who would be the Pivot doesn't have a positive wager, the role moves to the lowest-standing player who does.
Each player needs to wager ≥ 1/2 of the Pivot Player's wager to advance, otherwise they fold.
A player's questions will resolve NO if they fold, NO if they lose, and YES if they win. They can also resolve PROB if the end of the game is a split (75% for a two-way split, 66% for a three-way, 50% if it's somehow a four-way).
If two or more players stick it out to the end I'll reveal their hands, announce the winner, and resolve all the remaining questions accordingly.
If for whatever reason every player folds at any stage, the win goes to the player who held the highest YES wager on the previous round.
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 water! 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 trader bonuses on any questions 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 and comment them here for shared visibility.
1,000🏅 Top traders
| # | Trader | Total profit |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ṁ258 | |
| 2 | Ṁ126 | |
| 3 | Ṁ120 | |
| 4 | Ṁ83 | |
| 5 | Ṁ30 |
@Stralor thanks for the game. Congratulations @A
I was in quite an interesting and tricky position at the end there. I think I had absolutely no agency in how the game ended. If A wanted to win, they could outbid me. Even if they didn't, it's extremely unlikely their hand was worse than mine. But also, I couldn't even fold, because my position in the turn was higher, so if we both folded, I would win, and then I'd lose the mana I tried to fold with! So A could decide to lose, or decide to win. In the end the only thing I could do was wait for A to make a move. Luckily there were a few mana available from arbitrage.
Very fun stuff. :)
@Stralor I think this version was good, and I'd play again even if you didn't make any tweaks. However, the main thing I felt was lacking was a bluffing mechanism. In normal poker, everybody has to match the highest bidder to stay in, so if somebody makes a big bid you really need to ask yourself if they're bluffing. But with the "pivot" mechanism, you needed several players to bid high in order to raise the stakes, so bluffing isn't as powerful.
Also, the fact that you can (normally) fold and make a profit is a bit weird.
But of course, we're not playing Texas Hold Em; we're playing Manifold Texas Hold Em. It's ok for it to be a different game. But if anybody has any ideas to make it higher stakes, I'd be interested in that.
(That sounds like I mean "more mana" but I don't. What I mean is more like sunk costs such that folding is costly and bluffing is valuable. Maybe "high stakes" isn't he term for this but I can't think what is.)
@Fion Thanks, good game! I mostly agree with your analysis here, a few things I'd add:
Yeah when it got down to two players, I noticed I could make very similar profit by winning or by folding, but folding has the advantage that it's easier to force even if you don't know the other player's hand. That's why I very intentionally took a smaller position than you in that round -- I was surprised you didn't try to underbid me. I'm not sure how the game would've been resolved if we both bid 1 mana -- maybe fallback to the previous round bids?
I agree we need more mechanics to give an incentive to actually win -- in the end I picked to win mostly just for "fun" even though I think folding would've been slightly safer from a profit maximizing perspective. Maybe the initial buy-in should go into a pot paid out to the winner at the end, rather than just disappearing into a self-resolving market?
At the end I was a bit nervous that you were going to just get a last-minute 50k loan from a whale and force me to fold (or have a very short time to try to do the same). I agree with the suggestions below that we should have some kind of max/min bet to prevent the game from just turning into a whalebait contest at the end.
Slightly better liquidity on the staking markets would've been nice -- my M$1000 bet pushing it to 99.9% or whatever was basically giving free mana to whoever spotted it, but there wasn't really any other way for me to do it.
Regardless, I definitely enjoyed it, thanks to all who participated!
@A Are you saying you would have had net profit over all the markets if you folded? I guess this question had most of the liquidity, huh
@Stralor I didn't do the exact math but I think I probably would've. Most of the liquidity was in this market which had almost identical profits in both directions. Plus I had partially hedged my YES bets in the staking markets by betting NO on myself in the main market, so I think my net YES position wasn't that big.
@ChristopherRandles Yeah, it needs an all-in rule like real poker, whereby someone who bet all their mana gets fold protection.
@Jason hmm perhaps a simple max position? can bet at much as you want, but hitting that max guarantees advancement?
@Jason But could someone bet most of their mana on a safe outcome then get the fold protection? I did suggest a variant where players declare how much mana they are bringing to the table. If they bet that they get fold protection. Specifying lower amount might be better with this though
@Stralor Next time, have everyone establish their "max position" (aka the amount they are bringing to the table) ahead of time, that way it's like sitting down with X amount of chips. You're limited by your max position, but you're also protected by it.
I just realised; this is exactly what Chris said. Glad we agree!!
@ChristopherRandles I was assuming you'd need to bet at least the amount of mana you had on hand when the game started to get protection. A "max position" rule would work but would lose the potential drama / entertainment value of an all-in call.
@Gen @ChristopherRandles hmm the prob with "how much mana did they bring" is tracking how much they've spent. what if it's like if you hit 2x (or 3x/ 4x?) your buy-in wager on any round you're guaranteed to stay?
@Stralor so the first hand had minimum bets and forced limited advancement. I do prefer the variable advancement, and I'd rather accede to the fact that Manifold is different than a poker table and somehow lean into that without obviously throwing the games to the whales and the sharks
@Stralor Perhaps it is just easier to set say 200 mana position per bidding round as sufficient to advance that round? (i.e. same amount for everyone.) Admittedly this lacks the drama of the no limits poker. If lots of people go to that amount more than occasionally then perhaps it shows an appetite for higher stakes and it can be increased,
@Stralor I'm not sure how much of this discussion is about the present hand and how much is thinking of ideas for the next hand, but I'd appreciate a ruling on this hand before I decide how to bet. If A has the power to force-fold me by betting more than my balance, then that obviously affects how wise it is for me to bet on myself.
(Of course, it's actually not so simple. If A employs this plan, buying say 5,000 YES shares on themself, their probability will go up to like 99.9% or more. Self interested observers will then see an arbitrage opportunity and buy my market down to some low percentage, at which point I might be able to afford to stay in. Big assumption of efficient markets though, which is not guaranteed for the relatively small number of observers and the relatively small timescale we have...)
@Fion this affects future hands. no change today as I feel doing any this late in the game would be less fair. market corrections and efficient mana positions were obviously easier with Multi-Binary markets, so not having the functionality we needed in those is hurting us.
And after an easy, calm Turn, we enter the River with another 8 dropped.
This is the last round of betting, and as a reminder I will be closing and resolving at an undetermined time tomorrow to try to avoid snipes. (could be earlier than usual or could be later, by a bit or a lot 😇 )
I never participated in this market, or liked it, so I never got a notification to advance. Just a heads up, I had no idea that progression had happened until the market for my hand was closed. It might be worth creating a set of clear instructions to send people when you send them their hands.
I wasn't that excited about my hand, just providing feedback! I notice now that the other bets were quite low, so I would have stayed in had I been paying attention to this market
EDIT: good luck to the people who remain :)
@Gen oof. I tagged you in a comment way back in the beginning. I was hoping that would send a notification to pull you here, but I guess I shouldn't rely on people's notifications having the same settings. 🤔 I'm gonna chew on this because it's good feedback but I don't see an obvious solution yet
@Stralor I got the initial notification when I was tagged, and the message on discord, so that prompted me to seek out the first market.
I'm not really sure. It's possible I was meant to get a notification and it bugged (there has been some issues the last few days), or I may have just missed it and it timed out from my notification center? I checked before commenting earlier and I had nothing in my notifications for the last 2 days for this thread.
Just checked again. I have notifications from the market to buyin resolving, comments there pointing me here, but not from this thread until you replied to my comment just now. Like this:
I should have liked this market either way 😭
@Stralor I did get the tag notification to be clear, I just didn't like this market, comment, or bet, so I didn't get any notifications after that 😂
@Gen ahhh that makes sense. sounds like a simple tagging in each future round for each player would work then! I'll remember to do that. sorry about the accidental fold 😔
@Stralor No worries, you saw my hand! 🤣
The best thing (for me) would have been if the initial discord message contained, “here is the market for the game, read it through and like/follow the market so you don’t miss any updates”
I spent quite a bit of time clicking through the other markets to try and work out what was happening, and I was struggling with seemingly obvious things like who the “pivot player” is
Then I missed the flop completely! Lol!
It’s a fun idea, and I’m sure a lot of work for you, so thanks! I’ll buy into the next one and try not to mess it up 😆