As you all might know, Noesis is primarily a chess club. However, it is the goal of the current board to broaden the association’s horizons and extend them beyond only the game of chess. In this attempt, Noesis and the Knights (of the Kitchen Table) finally teamed up in the first week of February to present its first ever poker night, travelling from the world of chess to the realm of cards.
The event was, dare I say it, a massive success! It was fantastic to see avid gamblers and players new to the scene playing alongside each other and having fun. Moreover, the circumstances made for very entertaining games to say the least. We did not expect there to be this many poker enthusiasts among our members, but we were proven so wrong.
“I’m All In.”
— Ege, at least three times that night (he lost all hands)
As for the structure of the evening; we played No-Limit Texas Hold’em with increasing blinds during the night. For those unfamiliar, No-Limit Texas Hold’em is a card game you play against one or more opponents, with up to ten players at a table. If you play this game in a casino, there is also a dealer at the table who deals the cards. In our case, the dealer would rotate every round.
Each player is dealt two cards that only the player who gets them gets to see, not the rest of the table. Finally, five cards end up on the table that everyone gets to see and everyone gets to use. With these total seven cards (two for yourself and five common), each player tries to make the best possible combination of five cards total. This can be done by using your two own cards and three from the table, or one from yourself and four from the table. Alternatively, you could use only the five cards on the table, but in that case, the best you can hope for is a draw if you have to show your cards, because all your opponents also have that combination at least.
Because in No-Limit Texas Hold’em you have information that the rest of the table doesn’t have – namely the value of your own cards that no one else has seen – you can bluff. After all, you can pretend that you have better cards than you actually got from the dealer. And this is precisely what makes the game so interesting and exciting!
We decided to divide the players into groups of six to seven to play on three poker tables. Each player would start out with a thousand (1000) worth of chips and every time one would go bust, they could “buy themselves back in” and play with chips totalling a thousand again.
In retrospect, this did cause for some strange situations regarding chip value, mostly regarding inflation at said table, as every time someone would go bust the total amount of value on a table would increase. Moreover, this did not disincentivise the willingness to go all-in, because there was no consequence to losing it “all”, which is what makes poker such a risky – but also fun – game.
A possible solution for a future poker event however, would be to make new tables with eliminated players, where each table would, by design, have a single winner in the end and inflation would not occur.
For now, a little appreciation is in order for the Knights, as they handled and organised this event with great care and passion and we (literally) could not have organised this without them.
Finally, I’d like to thank everyone for coming and participating in the first-ever poker night, we also could not have done this without you all. All in all, we were delighted to have been able to organise such a great event.
This is definitely not the last different activity (likely social) we will be organising, so keep an eye out on the activity calendar.
See you soon!