Quote:
Originally Posted by nondescript handle
To get the equivalents of Doc Holliday and professional riverboat gamblers (which IMHO is the thing that sets poker in the old west apart from say dicing in historical TL1 societies in a world building sense) it needs to have a skill component (so that professional gamblers can expect to win over the long run -- say at the end of a month) but also luck based element (so that casual players can hope to win over a few games at one evening).
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I think that it specifically needs a
bluffing element too. Active bluffing, supression of one's "tells" (float to WIL?), paying attention (float to PER?) to the "tells" of other players.
Much of what makes poker poker is that you mislead the other playes into assuming you have a much worse, or somes much better, hand than you actually have. Because you don't really win anything on a royal straight flush if all the other players fold immediately. You need to get them to put coins into the pot, and they won't do that if they're sure they'd just be giving those coins to you.
In fact, I'd assume that most players, except the very best, tend to not win anything at all on a royal straight flush, because they cannot keep from telegraphing to the other players that they have a really good hand. With "tells", general enthusiasm not properly veiled, or overly enthusiastic betting. A hand that isn't the
very best possible probably tends to yield a higher win.
(All of that posits rational opponents, of course. Most likely people were more superstitious, more likely to believe in personal luck, at TL3 than at TL5, and even more so at the OP's TL1. But, then again, I'm not really sure if even very religious people would continue throwing vast amounts of money at high-stakes gambling if they kept losing.)