Overview of Poker at BASIS-Episode Two of The BOG

The hosts discuss the popularity of poker at their school, with many students playing during free time. They explain the rules of poker, including how to make bets and the importance of bluffing. They also mention that poker combines luck and skill, making it appealing to different groups of people. The hosts discuss the advantages and disadvantages of playing in groups, as well as the optimal number of players for a poker game. They also mention the need for a fair dealer and how cheating can cause tension. Overall, poker is seen as a competitive and fun game that has become popular at their school. I'm going to play a little bit of it, and I'm going to play a little bit of it for you. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Anthony Aktor, and I and my co-host, Therese Blooney, will be elaborating on the games and board games that we were talking about in our previous episode, particularly on the topic of poker, how it's played, why people play it, and why it's become such a social contagion at Bases to Sun North. Okay, so recently, with all the AP exams and finals that we have been taking, there have been a lot of days in class where there's just nothing to do, or where half the class is missing, or it's just not a learning day. So poker has been spreading around like a plague. You see people bringing poker chips, just having any opportunity to play this game at all. But you may be wondering, what exactly is poker, and how do you play it? And for me personally, I did not learn about this until these past few weeks, after we've been playing poker a lot. So, the goal of poker is to make as much profit as possible, to collect as much money or chips as you can. And the way it's set up is, it's a multiplayer game, so there has to be more than two to three people, and they each have two cards, which is called a hand. And they are competing against each other to have the most compatible cards with their deck, with the deck that is presented, which is five cards. And the process of the game is, after everyone gets their hand, or their two cards, the three cards of the five cards in the deck are revealed, and they make bets if they want to either continue and see the remaining cards, or if they want to fold, which is quitting the game and just not betting. And this process continues until all cards are shown. And the person with the most optimal hand, which can be described as either having two of the same numbers, or having three of the same numbers, etc., there's a lot of information online that you can find, whoever has the most optimal hand. So basically, in essence, those with the best hand try to bid as much money as possible and gain as much money as possible in order to win poker. Another component of poker is bluffing. Bluffing is basically where you don't have a good hand, or perhaps you intuitively know that you don't have as good of a hand as other people, but you play up your hand as if you had a good hand in order to win the game. And so lying, at the very least, bending the truth is a key component of how poker is played, and I think that's what makes it fun. Trying to decipher whether your friends, whether your family are being truthful or lying to you is a very fun aspect of poker, and I think that's what draws many people to it. Would you agree with that, Sussman? I would agree, and there's also a bit of strategy with that. You can't be obvious about something. You have to bluff sometimes, but you can't make it obvious that you have a hand that's very good or a hand that's very bad, but you want money so you're going to pretend it. You have to be careful about it. And there's a lot of factors you have to consider when bluffing. For example, with the money that you're betting, if you have, let's say, a very good bet, you can't bet in a lot of money and expect a lot of people to join in, because, likely speaking, they're going to fold and you're just not going to make any profit at all. And even when you're not bluffing, if you have a very good hand and you go all in and everything, people are going to see, oh, this person probably has a good hand, and so you're not going to get as big of a pot as you'd want. And so balancing playing up your hand and also not playing it up too much is a key component of how poker is played. And it just takes practice. There's no one method to decide how much money you should put in to get the maximum amount of money you can get. And it's also very situational and depends on the deck as well as the people you're playing. And in addition, we've recently seen that poker at bases to the North has become very popular. Extremely popular. And so I would say that poker... We talked in a previous episode about how some people prefer a luck component about a game or a skill and purely a merit-based component of the game. Poker combines these two aspects, where how good your hand is is obviously based on luck, but your ability to play that hand is based off your skill as a poker player, which attracts multiple groups of people to play poker. And additionally, like I mentioned earlier, it's a multiplayer game, and that just adds to the fun of it and allows a big friend group or just any compatible group to play. And having a group to play adds to this appeal to poker. Which is one of the reasons I would say it has gone so swimmingly at bases to the North. Because, take for example, you have a class. You have a huge class of people who all want to play a game with each other. Now, you can't play chess with those people. That's like a two-player game. If you can't play, most games have a hard limit as to the amount of people that can play. But for a game like poker, as long as you have enough chips and as long as everyone's willing to play with each other, the possibilities are virtually endless. Yep. Although, I would like to say that when poker, if the group is too big, it does get the fun out of it. And especially if the group, at least with my personal experience, is too loud and isn't willing to cooperate, it can just make the game boring. Yeah, I can definitely see that. I've witnessed that many of my classmates have incorporated playing as a team. So it would be teams in the poker match, and then you would play as a larger game. Yeah, I've had that experience as well, because very recently when you're playing poker in class, I've had to be in a group. How do you feel about having groups? How do you feel about groups? Well, on the one hand, I think it definitely targets the problem of there being too many people in a poker game. But if one person in the group takes a more assertive role, it can often sideline the other people who want to play poker. How about you? How do you feel? Let's see. At least with my personal experiences, I did not like it. Because, like you said earlier, it does just address the size problem when playing poker. And like how I mentioned earlier, sometimes when the group is too big, it gets the fun out of the game. Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. Do you think there's an optimal number of people who are playing poker? Let's see. So, with my experiences, I had the most fun when it was around seven people, six to seven people that were playing. I would definitely agree with that opinion. I don't really have that much experience playing poker, but I like playing with a good amount of people, but definitely not too many people. If you don't have enough people to play poker with, the game can often just drag on with one or two people consistently winning the game. Whereas if you have multiple people, probability is swayed, and so you have a greater chance of the game becoming more interesting. But on the other hand, if there are too many people, as you mentioned earlier, the game becomes too chaotic. And also, just generally speaking, the game becomes less fun when certain people become dealers. I don't know, this is just my personal experience, but the dealer always gets at least one really good hand if you have that experience as well. With every game I played, there was at least one person, or it was usually the dealer that got pocket aces. Yeah. I think that even if the dealer is not explicitly trying to cheat, perhaps they might get a look at the deck beforehand, and if they're not trying to cheat, that might sway the way that they deal out cards, resulting in an unfair advantage given to them. There's definitely a need for a fair and objective dealer in poker. Yeah, and that does bring to the topic about, if you see cheating, you're obviously going to get mad. So, have you noticed any major behavioral changes within yourself or with other people with poker? I would say so. I think the competitiveness is one thing, but also many people will blame their rocks and luck for losing, or have a self-aggrandizing perspective on themselves once they begin to realize that they have pretty good luck. Yeah, I did notice that people usually tend to either get more aggressive, get easily irritable, or get a lot cockier when playing poker. I would definitely agree with that. Was there anything else that you found in your research? No, not really. It's really interesting to see how poker spread like a plague. Definitely. Well, that will be all from us today. We will later talk about chess. We'll talk about chess as a board game, how it's played, the rules of it to play, and how you can understand and play chess with your friends, as well as basis perspectives on chess. With that, I'm Anthony Aktor. And I'm Therese Benyus. Have a great day.