Universal Eyes: No, he's in the BB in his example, everything is correct

/nit

puupia: to the ratholing: I know PartyPoker introduced a period you have to waight too and on the iPoker network this is implemented also. As well as the rooms Stars and FT that you mentioned. IDK about Ongame or some obscure networks, but rules against ratholing are pretty much the norm nowadays. It used to be different a few years ago though.

And you have a fair point about BK ring games being a little bit like long term tournaments!

1) At no online poker room I have played, you can rathole. You have to usually wait some time before you return with a shorter stack than what you left with, typically about 30 minutes or so.

2) There is no bullying in cash games. If I have 10k and you have 1k at the table, we only play for 1k each hand. The 9k I have behind don't help me in any way, shape or form. Big stack bullying is a concept of tournament poker, useless in cash games. Absolutely useless. I have stated this several times. If you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe a "noted poker authority" Ed Miller.

Gordon Shumway: Oh, and I didn't mean to imply that Fencer would even consider cheating, LOL, if I made it sound like that.

Czuch: The audit is that if there are any problems or cheats, nobody will play at your site....

There has been cheating on both Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet, yet there are still people playing on both sites, and they still make a healthy profit. And even the owners were involved in the scandal.

poker sites are likely some of the best managed sites for bugs and hacking that there are!

True for some sites, like PokerStars, definitely not true for other, more shady, sites.

I would never play for real money anywhere but on one of the big, trusted sites. Brain entry tournaments would be fun though.

Czuch and puupia: You can't "bully" people in a cash game. If you have 1 gazillion chips at the table and your opponent has 100 chips - every hand you play, you play for a maximum of 100 chips.

And there are games with bigger blinds.

Bernice: have you refreshed the page after turning it off?

Bwild: pokerstars and fulltilt allow 3 per hour.... I think that is very reasonable.

While this is very reasonable for Full Tilt and Stars, with their fast pace tables, I think it'd be OK to have a tougher limit here at BrainKing, but not less than once per hour. And maybe 90 minutes for pawns or something.

nodnarbo: I thought about chips -> brains, but don't like the idea. You really get into a grey area, the inflation of chips would be a serious problem, and collusion would become a serious problem. Better forget that idea imo.

And again, I don't see the problem with people reloading more than once a day. This is Poker for fun, not for money. What do people earn from dumping away chips and reloading frequently? Only playing experience, nothing more. You will never be able to reload when you have more than the starting chips, I really don't see the point in excluding players for a day when they lost a couple of chips.

Another rule that I don't remember being mentioned yet: going south. The term going south (also referred to as ratholing) describes a player winning a pot, leaving the table and buying back in with less chips. So he effectively "secures" his winnings (puts it into his rat hole) and will continue to play only for the minimum. This is commonly considered bad etiquette and most places don't allow this. Online, a common counter measure is to set a time limit. Say you have 1500 chips at a 500 minimum table and leave. During the next hour, if you want to rejoin this table, you have to take at least 1500 chips to the table. After that period you can buy in for the minimum of 500 again. Of course, this doesn't affect other tables, so you can always leave and enter a different table for the minimum if you are not comfortable with your current deep stack.

Oh, and are there waiting lists for full tables? Would be a good idea too.

All of this of course for the future! I think time out and blind posting and showdowns etc. have a higher priority obv.

puupia: Flooding the market is no problem at all. Every player can chose what stakes to play. If you have 1 million chips, playing 5/10 doesn't seem to be the most fun. If you have 1000 chips, playing 300/600 doesn't seem to be fun at all.

New players with their puny stack of 1000 chips have no chance whatsover playing agains someone with for example 1 million chips.

Wrong. If I have 1000 chips and sit down at a table and play against a guy with 1000000 chips - we are both playing for 1000 chips effectively in every hand. Him having 999000 more doesn't change anything, it doesn't give him better chances to win any hand. If you play a ring game, you can leave the table whenever you want, so play does not continue until one player has all the chips (in which case the rich would obviously be favored). Of course you can't catch up with the rich guy in just a couple of hands, but he had to play a lot to get these chips, so that's OK.

You chose the maximum you play for in any given hand by selecting your buy in. So the maximum is already under your control. Now you can chose the minimum by entering a table that suits your wishes. Removing minimum buy ins is a bad idea.

EDIT: for limit tables this is obviously a non-issue overall

Summertop:

Please, Please, Please....When a player times out...
1. Flag the player as timed out.
2. Force a fold, no matter what!
3. Don't deal them in to a new hand till they unflag themselves.
4. Let existing players boot timed out players (so others can take their seat).

1. Yes!
2. I think it is actually OK to let them check in the hand on that they timed out, just do it instantly when the action comes to them and don't wait for them to return.
3. Timed out should be = sitting out, so Yes!
4. Might be an option as might be auto boot them when they timed out and the big blind comes across them.

Fencer: OK, I was just about to paste Opera's error message, but the console doesn't allow me to copy more than one line, or I am to noob to figure out how. But now that you found an error, I'll just wait until tomorrow :) I'm just gonna play some other games and read some forums for now. Have a good time relaxing and thanks for taking care of this problem (which strangely only is a problem for me?)

AbigailII: Maybe we should stick to 1 table tournaments at first, and just play them to an end?

Gordon Shumway: seems like my system is really sucky.... :/

Fencer: Looked better, but now I get the following error:

Fehler: errorMessageTimeout.clearTimeout is not a function
Quelldatei: http://brainking.com/js/poker-19.js

Zeile: 1303

AbigailII: I think, at least at the beginning, if not generally, creating Poker tournaments shouldn't be a function available to everybody. Maybe do it like it's currently done with team tournaments. Have one or two members take care of it. Then you won't have to deal with a ton of never starting tourneys with weird settings. I don't think having countless tournaments on any given day would be a good thing, and people playing 10 tournaments simultaneously wouldn't either, that would only hold up the games unnecessarily.

Fencer: Great, thanks, looking forward to it

Fencer:
This is the Header that Firebug shows me for the AJAXTableRefresh GET response:

Date         Mon, 23 Feb 2009 19:58:20 GMT
Content-Type    text/xml; charset=utf-8
Pragma	          no-cache
Cache-Control	  must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Expires	          Friday, 12-Jul-02 23:59:59 GMT
Content-Length 309
Server	         Jetty(6.1.9)

Fencer: OK, I keep getting the following message continuously (using german version atm, so just translated it myself, and not guaranteeing that this is how it actually appears in the original version)

Error: syntax error
Source file: http://brainking.com/en/AJAXTableRefresh?g=20&bms=129401

Row: 1, Column: 1
Source Code:
5745:Czuch:0:2:1:5471:0:D7HT:-1:0:1:0|63960:snaky:0:2:1:1078:0:CAH7:-1:0:1:0||||||||;18197:Gordon Shumway;0;20;D2S8DTDAH4;3;63960;5745;0;1;10;0;0;2;19;11;1

Oh, and there is a "^" pointing to the first "D" in Czuch's line

AbigailII:

Tournament creation 1) players bring in their own chips (as is done now for the
existing poker tables) and 2) tournament chips are not related to the total
number of chips a player owns - you get a number of chips to play with, and
they're gone afterwards

How about a mix: You pay a tournament buy in - for example 500 chips - which is deducted from your chip balance and put in a price pool, and you receive tournament chips - for example 10k - which are not related to the chips in your account. Then the tournament could define a payout structure - for example, the winner gets all, or 70%/30% for 1st and runner up, or something similar. The payouts are then awarded from the price pool back to the winners' accounts.

More tables
If a tournament has 10 players or less, the tournament can be played
on a single table. Otherwise, the tournament has to start on more than
one table. As soon as 5 (or, in rare cases less) players are left at a
table, they advance to the next round (keeping their current number of
chips). Repeat until there's one table, with one winner left. Of course,
another cut-off number could be picked as well (perhaps only the top
3 should advance).

That is one way to do it, called shootout tournaments. There is, however, a more common practice of moving players to other tables until there is only one table left. For example, 20 players start a tournament, and there are 2 tables with 10 players each. Once 2 players get eliminated, tables are balanced. So if there are 8 players on table A and 10 players on table B, one player is moved from table B to table A. Once only 10 players are left, all players from table B are moved to the free seats at table A, and the final table is played out. This is however more complicated to implement and test, so maybe shootouts should be the way to get started. Oh, and all other suggestions you made are good. Usually blinds are increased time based, but for BrainKing I think it would be fine to do it based on No. of players or No. of hands. I actually think, No. of hands would be better. But please don't do it based on No. of rounds. That way, when there are only two players left, blinds would increase every second hand, not good imo.

Hi there :)

I just learned today, that we now have teh pokahs at BrainKing. Lovely ;)

I just skimmed through this board, and I wanted to drop some random thoughts on discussed issues.

1.) Free chips

On different sites, Playmoney is handled differently. At DoylesRoom for example, if you have less than 1000 chips, your chips will be reloaded once a day. On other sites, like Titan, you can reload whenever you have less than 1000 chips. Chips in play of course do count for that, so if you sit at a table with 500 chips and have 600 in your account, you can't reload. On Full Tilt there is an additional rule, that you have to wait 5 minutes between reloads. I think, for the enjoyability of the game, and especially for playing no limit, the latter version would be the best. 5 minutes might be to short of a time for BrainKing, but if you have to wait an hour to reload, that should be enough I think. And I think, everybody should be able to reload to 1k, you could just make pawns wait one hour and paid members 30 minutes or something. Time spans are just random suggestions and might be altered, but I think a day is to long, and 5 minutes maybe too short considering the generally slow pace of the games. People will lose interest in the Poker games rapidly, if they have to wait a day after losing their stack in one hand imo.

Also I absolutely hate the idea of resetting the chips after a certain time. In Poker, you play to accumulate chips. If I'd lose them without playing, that would ruin it for me...

edit: I also think it is better to reload to 1000 instead of adding 1000 on top

2.) Showing hands & Minimum raise

There is a quasi official selection of rules, I just can't find the link atm... :( Be assured though, that the two points discussed are handled identically at every site and brick & mortar casino:

Hands are only revealed when there is a showdown, i.e. there are still at least two players in the hand after the river betting round. If everybody but one folds, the cards remain unknown to the other players.

The only time you can raise for less than the previous raise on the same street in no limit/pot limit is when you go all in. So if I bet 20 on the flop, you'd have to raise to at least 40. If you decide to raise to 50 instead, the minimum amount I could raise to would be 80, making it 30 more. On the turn though, you could bet the minimum again.

3.) Posting blinds

It is indeed common practice that you won't get dealt a hand unless you post at least one big blind. So when sitting down you have the option to wait for the big blind to come to you, or you can post it in your current seat, if you are not sitting in one of the blinds, and not on the button. So you can post between "Under the gun" (first seat after big blind) and "Cutoff" (first seat before button). Also, when you sit out when the big blind comes to you, you can only be dealt back in by posting the big blind and small blind when you are in of those seats, or by waiting for the big blind again. If you sit out in the small blind, you can get back in by posting the small blind in one of those positions or waiting for the big blind again. If you post "out of position", there will of course be more blind bets than usual in the pot. Again, this is not necessarily "official", as there is no universely accepted Poker authority, but absolutely common place and generally accepted as de facto standard. Those rules assure, that no sit out wizards can play without paying blinds or with paying less than their opponents. If you post the big blind in the cutoff at a full 10 handed table, you pay 1 big blind for 7 hands, while you pay 1.5 big blinds for 10 hands by posting big blind and small blind in position. So, the cost per hand is nearly equal. That's part of the reason why you can't post on the button, too.

---

Anyway, nice to see Hold'em here :) Is there currently a problem with the refresh or something? The table doesn't refresh for me atm, is this a general problem, or something with my settings? Doesn't work in Firefox, Opera and Chrome though. It says connected, but actually nothing changes.