And with poker i mean Texas hold’em. Texas hold’em is one of the biggest hype’s of the last decade. Everyone is playing poker these days, aren’t you? I started playing poker in 2007. There a couple of things that made me interested in poker. Overall it’s a lot of math and commonsense, but even better it’s a big competitive massive multiplayer online game you can play any time of the day. It’s a game of skill, not luck. Therefor its not gambling, although a lot of people think it is. Of course it’s gambling in the short term, but i am pretty sure its a skill game in the long run.

I used to play cash games until i was on tilt a couple of times. Lost most of my winnings in matter of minutes. Each time this was around four months of daily grinding the low blind levels, a hard lesson. The conclusion is that cash games are not for me. They need a lot of patience and emotion control at all times. So tournament poker is the only type of poker that i play these days.

Winning
Most of the player lose money while playing poker, some people say 60% of the poker players lose money, 30% play even and only 10% win money in the long run.

Seems i am on the winning side as my online tournament statistics show since 2007:
Nickname: Quazion
Total Winnings: $3,925
Profit: $1,053
Return of investment: 37%
Average buyin: $5.95
Average number of players: 1315
In the money: 11%

Strategy
If you are interested in playing poker, be sure to read up some strategy guides on the Internet. A good way to get up and running quickly is to read some books about poker. I wanted to develop my own poker style and skill set. Therefor i haven’t read any poker books. Although this is working out. It will be easier and more profitable if you read some good books early on. In the end your poker style will be a combination of all your past poker knowledge.

Bankroll Management
Bankroll Management is the second most or maybe even the most important part in poker. You don’t want to go broke, just because your having a bit of bad luck. Master this!

Where to play poker
Pokerstars.com is the best site play to play poker if you ask me. A insane amount of people are playing there all the time, nearly 280.000 online at the moment of writing. It will be easy to find players in any game type and or buy-in. Other poker sites can be slow in filling tournaments and such, not pokerstars. Every hour new tournaments start with thousands of players. Smaller tournaments like the 180 player maximum can fill up in minutes. Other poker sites often try to lure you into unprofitable casino games. Like PartyPoker for example keeps flashing the Blackjack in your face, not Pokerstars.com its a nice and clean site.

Really i suggest you start playing at Pokerstars.com and forget all those other sites, unless your a poker professional and know what kind of people and games you are looking for.

Cashing out
A lot of people don’t trust poker sites or anything else in the internet with their money. Do you ever get it back? I can confirm that most online poker sites are very trustworthy. On multiple sites i have withdrawn funds back to my private bank account or my online Neteller account. Often this is done with in about three working days.

Good luck on the tables!

After my rant about the game of Travian last week i decided its time to do some game development of my own. The combination of Travian and Civilization sounds like a interesting concept. My goal for this week was to create a Hexagon map and be able to find a path from one place to the other on the map.

Hexagon map

The first step was to create a map. I choose for hexagons as tiles for my map. This is because on square maps diagonal movement is faster then in straight lines, which is awkward and can be unfair in some situations.

I created some hexagons in Inkscape and gave them some color with the GIMP. Created some trees as unwalkable tiles to test my path-finding routines against.

Some HTML and Javascript to draw the map in a browser.

A* Pathfinding

You want to be able to move units over the map, but as a player you don’t want to click each tile manual to create a path. Path-finding solves this by searching for the best path from point A to B. Later we can use this for computer controlled units, traders for example that go from village to village.

Since i knew nothing about path-finding i did some basics research about it on the web. It seemed it was A-star Pathfinding i needed. So i followed the “A* Pathfinding for beginners” guide. Really well written and understandable. Although i made a lot of mistakes at first. This was partly because i created it in Javascript, which was a bit of pain due to the fact that i had little Javascript knowledge. In about two evenings i had squashed most of the bugs and it worked under Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome.

The result

I’d guess i like to share my result with the world. So i cleaned up the interface and made it possible to test different paths easy. Maybe some else will find my Javascript implementation of A* Pathfinding on isometric Hexagons interesting or useful.

You can find my Hexagon Pathfinding in javascript example here. You can click on the map tiles to create or remove trees. Then with the “Draw Path” button you can generate the path. It should walk around all of the trees you planted.

Next week i will try do something with fighting between units.

I have been playing webbased games for a couple of years now. It all started with playing Planetarion. It introduced a new genre to the mass. Thousands of players where fighting over resources of small planets and asteriods, people could steal those asteroids from you to gain more resources. The biggest flaw in that game was that the stronger players would only attack weaker players, just to get stronger, also the stronger players would unite in the form of alliances to make them even stronger. Eventually there would be like three big alliances of which the two biggest would join up and kill the smaller number three. In the end the underdog will always loose in games like this. If you produce more resources then the smaller folks and you steal resources from them, you will grow exponential faster then the smaller players. Which means the bigger players get bigger while the smaller get smaller. This means the semi casual competitive player can never stand up v.s. the addicted fanatic players.

Recently i am having a second look on Travian, which is based on the same concept, gather resources, build armies and rob you smaller neighbor. Now since i started a couple of weeks later then the average player on this server i am very small and being attacked by players 2000% larger then me. Now in Travian its possible to make sure your opponent doesn’t steal any resources from you, but he then threatens you with destroying your small village with his catapults, if you don’t give him some resources. So after two weeks of playing my village is destroyed, by a extreme bigger player.

This gets me thinking about creating a web based war game in where smaller players have a better edge and some players will decide to stay small. Just because they like that play style. Or the bigger player just a have some negative side effects to keep it all in balance. For a smaller player its easy to sneak into a big empire and steal some resource without a bigger player ever noticing it. Also it could be possible that running major armies has a bad influence on your population, nobody likes war now do they?

Maybe i should just stick to games like Hattrick (Footbal manager), since managing games have a lot more balance, due to the fact you can’t steal players from each other.

Though in the end, sometimes i am the bigger stronger player and i like to farm the smaller players just as good. But i guess i wouldn’t mind a game which is like a combination of Civilization management and Travian like warfare, which is balanced so that smaller players have a better underdog position.