Sunday, February 10, 2008

Chinese Poker exposed card during deal

As Dealer's Choice was winding down, we ended up by playing a round of Chinese Poker. During one of the hands a card was flipped up and exposed for the whole world to see. We ended up getting the second deck and redealing but I posted the question about mis-deals on a poker forum. The funny thing is halfway through writing up my post I realized just how irrelevant seeing one card from another player's hand is. If Royal is positive that I have a 7c in my hand, how can he maximize use of that knowledge? We were four handed so if the 7c was not in his hand it was guaranteed to be in someone else's. And obviously by extension, ANY card not in his hand was guaranteed to be in someone else's. And as we have seen, there are plenty of cases where having another player play his hand face up would not affect the point outcome of the matchup. Even if the action were shorthanded I wonder if there is any utility to knowing a specific card is in someone's hand. Going to have to mull this one over some more.

In the meanwhile, even though there may be a strong case to suggest that it doesn't matter if there is a single known card in someone's hand, I think we should shuffle the card back into the stub and continue dealing as long as there are enough cards left in the stub for any player to receive that card. If it happens while dealing the last card to everyone then I think that a (admittedly lengthy) re-deal should occur.

No comments: