[benlessard]

Im wondering who among you are "Gamemasters" ?

Poker - I did pretty well in HE limit 20$-40$ during the golden era of online poker. I do still play NL 2-4/3-6, from time to time but not for a living. It might be fun to make a playmoney/low stakes tourney.

Tarot - A very interesting french card game that surprisingly play well at 3,4 or 5. http://en.wikipedia....ki/French_tarot --rules look complicated but its fairly simple to learn tough to master. Defense in tarot is much more complicated than in bridge, and declarer play is very tricky. Played many full night of tarot in my youth.

Go Im 2kyu on KGS ive been playing go for close to 20 years but took a 10 years break in the middle. I consider Go to be the king of Games.

Shogi is japanese chess, its Imo as complex as bridge and chess put together. I have about 2500 games on shogidojo. Shogi is by far the most underrated game I know. There is not a lot of non-japanese that play shogi however.

For others boardgames ; I did waste at least 1 college year playing Axis & Allies and chess, I mostly love auction games/ placement workers game (Caylus, Agricola) cards games (Race fot the Galaxy, Dominion) and wargames that play in less than 90 minutes.

[JLOGIC]

I used to (obv arrogantly) say I am probably the best overall game/card player in the world lol. As often happens in life, you grow up and meet people who are better at stuff than you. I obviously don't know how many people are better, but I know one for sure: Steve Weinstein.

Steve once offered the following bet, open to anyone in the world: You have to play 4 of these 5 games, you got to choose which one you threw out: NL HE, Bridge, Hearts, Spades, and Clabiash (I have no idea how to spell this I don't know how to play it either). Minimum bet 100k, terms of each game to be decided. He got no takers, and I doubt there is anyone in the world who could beat him, depending on how partners are decided in the partnership games (I think he was suggesting you get to pick a partner of your choice, he does also, and technology would eliminate cheating possibilities).

Ok, maybe that is a stupid bet, but here is another story about Steve. A bunch of people including great card players were at Bobby Levins lakehouse. They were all playing a card game called asshole, which everyone but steve had played before. He was pretty bad getting the hang of everything, whatever. Everyone goes to sleep, and 8 hours later when people are getting up Steve suggests playing asshole. He crushes everyone, makes some amazing plays, and announces that he stayed up thinking about the game, lol.

Right before he won his first Vanderbilt, he won a big poker tournament for I think almost a million bucks. He was also one of the top players playing the top stakes in the mid 2000s. This was the golden era, because few people knew what they were doing, but that is because the game had not evolved yet, everyone was still learning, and Steve learned the fastest, because he's such a great cardplayer.

He doesn't play as much poker these days but he definitely made 7 figures easily before getting bored with it...after refocusing on bridge he started winning everything.

It is hard to judge who is the best game player, because it depends on how you focus your energy and there are so many games, some more complicated than others. A guy who is the best go or chess or bridge player in the world but doesn't even play other games might be the best game player but he chose to completely master one of the hardest ones. Even a guy who is elite but not top level at 2 games might be worse than the guy who chose to go the extra mile and be the very best at one. When I was 10 or 11 I was top 10 in both hearts and spades on the yahoo ladder, I was definitely elite at both games, and I also was the best at a couple of strategy computer games. But those games are pretty simple and more importantly have less competition for being the best. When I started playing bridge I obviously focused all of my attention there, but that didn't make me a worse games player even though I basically only played one game at that point. So I think it's impossible to say who's the best, but I'm pretty confident Steve is the most talented natural game player I've ever seen. Joel Wooldridge is also high up there, and I'm sure Kit Woolsey must be also. Also I can't imagine that Phil Ivey would not be up there, he is the best at so many forms of poker it's insane and they're basically different games, I'm sure if he played some other non poker games he would crush too. Bob Hamman was a very good chess player, is an extremely good backgammon player, was the best bridge player, etc, so he is probably up there.

[benlessard]

I have little doubt that SW is the king of card games. What I also find impressive is players that excelled at games that I consider very different in nature. Like a chess type game, a imperfect information game (bridge) or a "luck" game like backgammon, being good with cards is simply not the same thing than being good at backgammon imo.

IMO poker is a different "beast" because you can have a lot of maths/analytical skill and if you manage to keep your emotions under control you can do great even if your not a gamer at heart.

Quote

Phil Ivey would not be up there, he is the best at so many forms of poker it's insane and they're basically different games

IMO most poker form are fundamentally the same except 7 card stud wich is much more complex that its simply not in the same class than the others poker forms. I have little experience with triple draw game but im pretty sure that the poker fundamentals are the same. Of course you have to "learn/get experience" for each game but the set of skills and the fundamentals are the same.

PS to all ...What are you favorites boardgames/PC games ?

[Aberlour10]

So I play bridge almost exclusively online, so my offline game is SKAT probably most popular german card game, usually 2-Cent-Skat (2 Cent per point )with friends while pub meetings. I wish my bridge bidding would be so good as the skat one ( its named "Reizen" ) heh ;-)

[mgoetze]

I'm not a master by any measure but I've had moderate success in a variety of other games. My first competitive endeavour was the game of Diplomacy, where I broke into the top 200 in a world-wide ranking of Diplomacy players which at the time listed a bit over 2000 players. In Go, I reached the level of 1kyu (EGF) before continued success started to demand a level of effort I was not willing to put in. I played organised Doppelkopf for a while, culminating in a 3rd place finish in the premier team league, but all the while I was playing at the top levels I watched one good player after another go into "retirement" to focus on poker, bridge, WoW or whatever with no fresh blood coming in so I decided to quit before it became too horrible. Now I've settled on Bridge as the right game for me... just that I still haven't found the right partner...

Poker, on the other hand, has always seemed a bit boring to me. My impression is that being a successful poker play just involves a lot of folding.

[Antrax]

I just like games. I don't want to make a job out of it, so I typically get to the highest level at which they're still fun, i.e. where nobody yells at me for trying a cool move instead of the most technically correct one. I want to be allowed to have fun, and one career is enough for me.

As for games themselves, my poisons are chess (+ some variants), hold'em and Magic: the Gathering. Go was fun but I was constantly drawn to playing not-really-Go with short time controls and a 9x9 board because I'm a part of the ADD generation - I really have a problem playing "seriously" in front of a computer. Moreover, I couldn't find a live Go game. Maybe I'll get back to it if/when I get tired of Bridge.
Shogi was really interesting but I learned chess at an early age and it just messed up with my perception of the moves. My brain kept trying to chess the positions, it was annoying.
M:tG is really underrated IMO. All the fantasy elements make it look like something for kids, but at its core it's really a very clever game. The best one I know, but I'm still very early in my Bridging

[billw55]

I attained a modest skill level at several games, but never really expert at any of them. In rough chronological order, chess, poker, go, bridge, backgammon. Poker probably least of all skillwise, I made some money in the post-rounders boom, but mostly by game selection.

Dominion is fun but not really very demanding on skill.

[BunnyGo]

Mgoetze did you know "jonthewolf" in your diplomacy games? He was one of the better online players I knew and occasionally did well at major tournaments.

As for myself, I'm a bit of a game addict, but bridge and diplomacy are the two I've spent the most time getting better at. I played Go until I was a 5 kyu on KGS, but then realized I had to memorize openings and got bored. I played chess until the same problem arose. I play tichu (great card game) but I don't know of any "competitions".

As for board games I've tried many of them. I used to love axis and allies, but after the openings got easy I got bored. Settlers was fun for a while, and I had limited success (never major tournaments, couldn't care enough but some local ones). These days I love Powergrid because it is inherently difficult (and total information). The game punishes you for being in the lead so there's a jujitsu to the game in trying to balance your score vs. when the game will end.

Diplomacy was a big favorite for a while, and if I had the time I'd still be playing online. The best compliment I ever received with that was being introduced to a new player by way of, "Ben will never lie to you; if he says he'll do something, he'll do it. And bad things will happen to you, and you won't know why, but Ben's somehow doing them." I never had the time to play enough to have big success, but my record and opponents were quite good--unlike bridge a single f2f game takes all day, and an online or post game takes months to years, and I had to graduate.

[mgoetze]

I never had the patience for online Diplomacy. I preferred FTF games with strict time controls and set end date after 1907 or so, where you could get in 3 rounds per day.

[BunnyGo]

 mgoetze, on 2012-February-16, 09:41, said:

I never had the patience for online Diplomacy. I preferred FTF games with strict time controls and set end date after 1907 or so, where you could get in 3 rounds per day.

1907! Ok...that explains how the games would end in time to get on with it. I found FTF easier, but I liked playing the endgame too much (1907 is just getting into a lot of it). Learning to play online helped my writing a lot I think.

[wank]

i liked diplomacy. impossible to get enough people together though after university (10 years ago).

[billw55]

Nobody has mentioned Scrabble, which has a pretty big following. I suppose this means that it is a very different sort of game cognitively from the other games under discussion, and therefore draws a different sort of player.

[BunnyGo]

That's true, I did spend a while learning scrabble from my mom, but never played competitively. There's a lot of board control that comes into it as well, but again I hated memorizing short "legal" words.

[paulg]

The tournament Scrabble scene is considerably smaller than bridge. There are many similarities between the games in terms of skills required, but Scrabble does require considerable word study. As far as I know none of the very top Scrabble players play much bridge, although some of their spouses do.

[Phil]

Paul, what's an average score for you or your wife in Scrabble?

[jjbrr]

[CSGibson]

 paulg, on 2012-February-16, 12:43, said:

The tournament Scrabble scene is considerably smaller than bridge. There are many similarities between the games in terms of skills required, but Scrabble does require considerable word study. As far as I know none of the very top Scrabble players play much bridge, although some of their spouses do.

Dave Weigand used to be a member of the ACBL Junior program, and he is one of the top tournament scrabble players in the world. Occasionally I'll see him at a club game.

[Foxx]

I'm a regular at a Scrabble club in La Jolla that gets together once a week. One of the other regulars in the club, Jan, scored a stunning upset over Dave Wiegand in a tournament last year in San Diego.

[Cyberyeti]

 JLOGIC, on 2012-February-16, 01:06, said:

Clabiash (I have no idea how to spell this I don't know how to play it either).

Do you mean http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Klaberjass

Andrew Dyson was a very fine bridge and chess player I was at university with, IIRC he won the world juniors and the gold cup (twice) at bridge, was a little shy of IM strength at chess, not sure about his prowess at other games (other than eating stupidly hot chilli at which he was a GM ).

I believe he and John Hobson who was also in that team both gave up bridge in their 20s or early 30s to make their fortunes.

I enjoy lots of boardgames, going over to the show in Essen every October to stock up on interesting stuff. Power grid, Tichu, Age of steam and various of the more recent German boardgames are favourites.

[paulg]

 Phil, on 2012-February-16, 14:26, said:

Paul, what's an average score for you or your wife in Scrabble?

Outside of the USA, a world-class player will average about 440-450 per game. In the USA it will be about twenty points lower, because the US dictionary has fewer 2- and 3-letter words which makes scoring harder.

My wife is currently the top-rated woman in the world. Dave Wiegand is arguably the best player in the US and also one of the best in the world - his wife is also an excellent bridge player.

A scrabble game takes the same length of time as an 8-board bridge match and probably has a similar element of luck.