The Cardplayer Decathlon

[thepeopleseason]

I spent the entirely of my day yesterday doing just about nothing. Oh, I picked up around the house and did a load of laundry, but for the most part, I just sat in front of the television and watched about eight hours of poker coverage (two WPTs, two Championship Poker at the Plazas, and a Celebrity Poker Showdown), along with two episodes of Six Feet Under. In all of the poker coverage, I did happened to catch a commercial for PokerInAthens.org, a group trying to petition the Olympic committee to include poker as one of the games in the Olympics.

Given that the IOC has already declared the World Bridge Federation a "Recognized Sport Organization," I don't think the site intends to be overly satirical--there are a few Onion-esque articles, but I think their ultimate aim is to get poker recognized as an Olympic-worthy sport. Honestly, I love poker, but it's not a sport. Nor are Chess and Bridge, the IOC's decisions nothwithstanding.

But the subject did bring to mind something that I've been thinking about for a while.

Back when DuPree's was DuPree's, there was a time where a whole bunch of us just went up to the bar to just play cards. We'd play Spades, Hearts, Pitch, Poker (for matchsticks, not money), a silly pot-matching game called Three-Card Dumbass (with hand values a lot like Three-Card Brag). We were just a bunch of card-playing fools.

At one point I suggested we should have a big tournament where we just played the games we loved to play and figured out who would come out on top. I thought about it again yesterday, so I came up with the following "Cardplayer Decathlon" event:

At the very minimum, there would need to be at least four players, with eight being the ideal. They would play the following games:

Game	# of Players	Winning Pt Value	Tournament Point Breakdown	Modifier
Tonk	2	10 Hands	Card value of Loser's hand	1
Cribbage	2	120	Difference Between Winner & Loser pt. values	10
Pitch	4	21	Difference between all players' pt. values*	10
Rummy	4	500	Difference between all players' pt. values*	1
Spades (with randomly chosen partners)	4	500 pt.game	Difference Between Winner & Loser pt. values divided between winning players	10
Hearts	4	100	Difference between all players' pt. values*	10
Gin	2	200	Difference between Winner & Loser pt. values	1

Since it's a Decathlon, I decided to include Cribbage, Pitch, and Rummy, even though those are games we don't really play regularly. You could substitute Euchre, Bridge, and Canasta somewhere in there, with the appropriate modifiers, but since I don't know how to play any of those, I opted to go without...

When those games have been finished, we tally the number of points each player has, multiply those figures times ten to generate chip counts for each player, and then we move into the poker phase of the decathlon:

1. 2 rounds (16 hands) Omaha Hi/Lo, ring style.
   
2. 4 rounds Pot Limit 7 Card Stud
   
3. No Limit Holdem

Maybe I play cards too much...

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* For example: if the final point counts in Hearts is Alice 76, Bob 102, Carol 46, and Dan 85, Carol would receive 125 points (30 Alice, 56 Bob, 39 Dan), Alice would receive 5 (26 Bob, -30 Carol, 9 Dan). Dan and Bob would not receive any points (negative points in a game would not count against you).

Comments

decathlon

[khubli.livejournal.com]

drop Spades (individual events should not be combined with group efforts). There are handicaps even when you randomly assign. hearts is so similar to spades.

Drop Pitch and cribbage, and Rummy.
Drop Tonk, it's too much like Gin.

Make it a Pentathlon...

just my thoughts.. it would take a few days to run...