entirely safe and fun

“Ox 1, you’re on the clock,” he said, promiscuously mixing ‘draft’ puns. PD photo from wp.

“Yoker” because it’s… wait for it… draft poker. Yeah, I know, you see what I did there.

You’ll need 4-7 players and a standard poker deck, probably with the jokers removed (subject to playtesting, see below). Dealer deals seven cards, face down, to each player, and sets aside the rest of the deck face-down; it does not figure into further play of the hand. Each player picks up his hand, selects one card from that hand, and puts it face down in front of himself. He then passes the remaining six cards to his left face-down, taking a hand of six from his right-hand opponent, also face-down. He picks up his new hand, selects one of the six cards in it, puts it face-down in front of him along with the first card he chose, and then passes his hand to the left.

Before players pick up their hands of five cards, there is a round of betting (not for real money, of course) that starts with the dealer, using whatever ante and limit rules make sense to your table. Any player that folds leaves the game until the next hand; they shuffle whatever cards were in their hand, plus any that were in the face-down pile in front of them, back into the deck, without revealing them. Once the betting is resolved, players pick up their hands of five, draft a card into their face-down piles, pass the four remaining cards left face-down, and continue in this way until all cards are drafted. There is a round of betting before drafting the third, sixth, and seventh card; also, a final round of betting occurs after the seventh card is selected. All players still in the game after this last round then reveal their seven face-down cards, and then score the best five-card hand they can make from their seven face-down cards, using the standard poker hand order. The winner takes the pot (tied co-winners splitting it evenly).

Why this may be more fun than other poker games: Both the “public cards” information and the variance are spread out very differently among the players. In Hold ‘Em, everyone knows about the same cards that are in their opponents’ hands; in yoker, each player knows what he passed, can guess which downstream opponents took those cards, and may be able to infer things about his upstream opponents’ hands based on what they’ve passed him. Variance is spread out too, in that I can know that I passed A♠ to my left-hand opponent (probably improving his hand) so I could take the 9♥ that gave me a three-of-a-kind.

Possible changes:

• Some rule about when you can look at your face-down cards is necessary. I’m leaning toward “any time” but maybe the right answer is “only during betting rounds” or maybe even “only at the showdown” to keep the game moving along.
• It’s possible that the game works better if the dealer button gets passed to the right after each round of betting concludes, rather than just between rounds.
• Perhaps there should be more round(s) of betting? Not sure how that would be handled yet without clashing with people’s poker intuitions too much.
• Adding one or both jokers as wild cards might or might not be fun — I am leaning toward “not”.
• The game could be expanded to eight players either by shuffling two decks together (more variance, not recommended) or drafting six cards (not as much scope for skill, æsthetickally displeasing as poker usually has five- or seven-card hands).
• Seating order matters more than usual in other poker games. Maybe there should be a rule for re-seating the players from time to time? Or switching the pass direction?
• For two- or three-player games, replace the drafting mechanism with something like Winston Draft, q.v. I think that having just two players left in the game after the third pick, when two or more have folded out, still leaves enough hidden information to have a fun game, even though those two players are just passing packs back and forth.
• Oh yeah, one other thing that would potentially be awesome: hi-lo hand scoring.

15 Feb ‘09, 11.43am PST PST: by ccreitz

At the Toronado, like always. So tasty!

5 Feb ‘09, 5.27pm PST PST: by ccreitz

Thanks Jenn! The cycle of possession continues.