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Jane Street's Figgie card game

figgie.com

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Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#3
Love this. I’d really like to play with real cards, but the uneven suit setup makes that tough as a party game unless the host sits out. I guess you could prepare a bunch of decks ahead of time. At 4 minutes a round you’d need maybe 10 decks for an hour of playing though. To even it out I guess you’d have 12? But that means you’d have more info about what’s likely in later rounds..

Hmm. Maybe I can nerd snipe some into making a deck sorter..

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#4
post #3

Love this. I’d really like to play with real cards, but the uneven suit setup makes that tough as a party game unless the host sits out. I guess you could prepare a bunch of decks ahead of time. At 4 minutes a round you’d need maybe 10 decks for an hour of playing though. To even it out I guess you’d have 12? But that means you’d have more info about what’s likely in later rounds.. Hmm. Maybe I can nerd snipe some in…

Sort the deck ino 4 stacks by suit, have somebody else remove the cards without looking at the suits, shuffle stacks back into a deck.

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#5
post #3

Love this. I’d really like to play with real cards, but the uneven suit setup makes that tough as a party game unless the host sits out. I guess you could prepare a bunch of decks ahead of time. At 4 minutes a round you’d need maybe 10 decks for an hour of playing though. To even it out I guess you’d have 12? But that means you’d have more info about what’s likely in later rounds.. Hmm. Maybe I can nerd snipe some in…

Sort the deck ino 4 stacks by suit, have somebody else remove the cards without looking at the suits, shuffle stacks back into a deck.

Yes. I think you’d want half the players to watch the stack placement and half the removal and rearrangement. Lots of incentive to peek.

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#6
There is a fantastic blog post by Ross Rheingans-Yoo about the shortcomings of poker as a tool to teach trading and why Figgie is a better one. https://blog.rossry.net/figgie/

He also wrote an equally brilliant eulogy about Max Chiswick, one of his colleagues, who helped him develop it. https://blog.rossry.net/chisness/

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#7
I downloaded the app to try it. It's interesting, appears that you can join a game with other players? I see two tabs: "4 starting" and "12 active" But clicking on these had no effect until suddenly the overflow broke rendering.

I am fascinated by this app mostly because it has a recruiting message at the bottom from Jane Street. I've never seen that before.

But, it's also interesting because it is one of the more poorly designed apps I've seen. It's react native when you check out the logs using adb. I bet this was a side project from a Jane Street employee. They did their best.

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#8
This game seems like it shouldn't work playing one-off games with no money on the line. How do you win in that context - by ending up with the most money at the end of the game? That would change the gameplay very significantly - a strategy that has you end with $1000 one time in three and 0 the rest should be favoured over one where you end up with $300 every time.

Poker solves this with poker tournaments: everyone starts with say $10,000 in play money and plays until one player wins it all. Backgammon solves it with match play: two players play first to say 7 points. In both cases, additional complexity is introduced to the game as optimal strategy changes depending on the size of the bets relative to the players' stacks or the number of points remaining.

Backgammon is just about playable as a one-off without a cube, though not by serious players. A single hand of poker without wagering makes no sense at all. Figgie seems closer to poker than backgammon, based on my reading. But it's being presented as a game to play one-off with bots or strangers. What am I missing?

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#9

There is a fantastic blog post by Ross Rheingans-Yoo about the shortcomings of poker as a tool to teach trading and why Figgie is a better one. https://blog.rossry.net/figgie/ He also wrote an equally brilliant eulogy about Max Chiswick, one of his colleagues, who helped him develop it. https://blog.rossry.net/chisness/

Wow, that’s sad about Max Chiswick.

I was reading about him and his peculiar approach to eating only a couple of months ago.

May his work on poker live on.

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