Video poker is a casino game based on five-card draw poker. It is played on a computerized console similar in size to a slot machine.
Video poker is a single-player game. The problem with video poker is that it’s a pretty simple game. It’s been solved. You can go dig up the numbers for when to do what to play optimally, given the information you have. It’s repetitive. There’s just…not a lot going on with it as a game, even if it kinda looks like traditional poker.
Traditional poker is a multiplayer game. Different players are playing against each other. That introduces bluffing, and that makes for a more-complicated game.
That being said, even traditional poker is mostly solved. It’s just complicated-enough enough to do that most people aren’t going to play optimally.
Von Neumann solved poker – including bluffing – for optimal play back when he developed game theory (and in fact, did his work with the initial intent of solving poker).
For Von Neumann, the inspiration for game theory was poker, a game he played occasionally and not terribly well. Von Neumann realized that poker was not guided by probability theory alone, as an unfortunate player who would use only probability theory would find out. Von Neumann wanted to formalize the idea of “bluffing,” a strategy that is meant to deceive the other players and hide information from them.
In his 1928 article, “Theory of Parlor Games,” Von Neumann first approached the discussion of game theory, and proved the famous Minimax theorem. From the outset, Von Neumann knew that game theory would prove invaluable to economists. He teamed up with Oskar Morgenstern, an Austrian economist at Princeton, to develop his theory.
Their book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, revolutionized the field of economics. Although the work itself was intended solely for economists, its applications to psychology, sociology, politics, warfare, recreational games, and many other fields soon became apparent.
To the extent that poker remains unsolved, it’s trying to determine whether someone is playing non-optimally or has other weaknesses and trying to take advantage of that (e.g. exploiting information leaks via tells, something like that).
It’s only solved mathematically, but that’s not the interesting part of poker to me, the interesting part is the psychology of it. You communicate through your bets, posture and posture at the table, as well as when you show vs hide folded hands. The actual statistics are only interesting when trying to decide whether someone is bluffing or playing “optimally.” And I don’t think you can solve “bluffing” either, because just knowing the theory behind bluffing changes how and when you bluff.
So yeah, exploiting tells and other non-book actions makes poker interesting to watch at the higher levels.
None of that relates to Balatro at all. There are no stakes, no bluffing, etc. How you play a given hand is a lot less interesting than how you construct your deck. It doesn’t play like poker at all, it plays like Slay the Spire w/ a poker theme.
It’s not so much “poker” as a broad theme that I have an issue with, but specifically video poker:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_poker
Video poker is a single-player game. The problem with video poker is that it’s a pretty simple game. It’s been solved. You can go dig up the numbers for when to do what to play optimally, given the information you have. It’s repetitive. There’s just…not a lot going on with it as a game, even if it kinda looks like traditional poker.
Traditional poker is a multiplayer game. Different players are playing against each other. That introduces bluffing, and that makes for a more-complicated game.
That being said, even traditional poker is mostly solved. It’s just complicated-enough enough to do that most people aren’t going to play optimally.
Von Neumann solved poker – including bluffing – for optimal play back when he developed game theory (and in fact, did his work with the initial intent of solving poker).
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/1998-99/game-theory/neumann.html
To the extent that poker remains unsolved, it’s trying to determine whether someone is playing non-optimally or has other weaknesses and trying to take advantage of that (e.g. exploiting information leaks via tells, something like that).
It’s only solved mathematically, but that’s not the interesting part of poker to me, the interesting part is the psychology of it. You communicate through your bets, posture and posture at the table, as well as when you show vs hide folded hands. The actual statistics are only interesting when trying to decide whether someone is bluffing or playing “optimally.” And I don’t think you can solve “bluffing” either, because just knowing the theory behind bluffing changes how and when you bluff.
So yeah, exploiting tells and other non-book actions makes poker interesting to watch at the higher levels.
None of that relates to Balatro at all. There are no stakes, no bluffing, etc. How you play a given hand is a lot less interesting than how you construct your deck. It doesn’t play like poker at all, it plays like Slay the Spire w/ a poker theme.