Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

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> People don't want to admit it involves hard work and luck

My favorite realization from actually playing cards. We used to play a lot of rummy on vacations as a family. Like a lot.

I kept losing. Hard. Absolutely destroyed. If only I could get this one card to complete my hand, I’d win every time. But it just wouldn’t come! I had terrible luck. Someone else always ended up winning before I got the one card I needed to make the high score and beat everyone else into submission. It was infuriating.

After a while I changed tactics. No waiting. Make a play on every play. Something, anything, with whatever cards you’ve got. Find a way to make the card you just picked up work.

Suddenly I was winning almost every game. Everyone complained how much it sucks to play cards with me. How does this kid always get exactly the perfect card!?

Now I’m banned from playing cards with family. Last time I played rummy was with my girlfriend’s family over Christmas a few years ago. They banned me immediately. Cards never come up again in conversation lol.

It really isn’t about the cards. They’re just the ingredient.

This is really visible in bridge; the hands are all random but how you play them is entirely skill.

Anyone can win with a perfect hand; the skill comes in dealing with the imperfect hands. True in life, too.

Bridge is nice that you can compensate for skill somewhat by handicapping, and the less-skilled players can still get a great hand and win sometimes. I always say "bridge is a fun game to lose" - and that's a really important part of a game you want to play.

Bridge is a weird game in that the actual play of the hand is almost unimportant. You can lose the game by playing the hand badly, but you can only win consistently in the bidding.

Which is why abstract and complicated bidding systems dominate the game, which gives it that lovely, steep initial learning curve.

There's an interesting genre of card games (President https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_%28card_game%29 probably being a good representative) which are literally rigged in a way that makes the previous winner easier to win the next time and harder for the previous loser to succeed.

There is still quite some mobility, but it effectively makes for different optimal tactics within the same game as your unfair start position determines whether it's best to risk things or not, what score is achievable depending on your position, etc and IMHO it has quite some parallels with real life decision making.

now imagine each bad play had a cost and you had a budget before too many knocked you out of the game

now imagine doing nothing had a cost and you decided to sit there and pout because others have better cards

This is really not a helpful reply.

To make rummy a good metaphor for this discussion, you need to modify the normal $1/point rummy gambling rules; say making gin gives you $1000 bonus from the house or something. (There's a resemblance to quiddich here, I think.) Anyway, now you have the two extreme strategies: knock if you can, which gets you a few dollars each time, or try exclusively for gin, which usually costs you money on each hand but sometimes pays off. If you're skint, the gin strategy won't work since you can't stay in the game long enough. If you're flush, the knock strategy is uninteresting because a few dollars doesn't make a difference.

Now make that bonus $10,000,000,000 and you're making some unicorns, Harry!

Now imagine you only have budget for a single round before being eliminated and some of your opponents have money to keep playing indefinitely. That would be the most accurate metaphor

Well, there's always the option to kick the table over.

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