- Poker Games Rules
- Wall Street Poker Rules Card Game
- Wall Street Poker Rules Against
- Wall Street Poker Rules Online
Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for The Poker Face of Wall Street at Amazon.com. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. Wall Street Poker is a form of stud poker which also features community cards. It is named after the financial district of New York and the movie of the same name, because of a strategy of aggressive bidding involved. Players are initially dealt three hole cards, two face down, one face up. Everyone pays an ante. Liar's Poker is a non-fiction, semi-autobiographical book by Michael Lewis describing the author's experiences as a bond salesman on Wall Street during the late 1980s. First published in 1989, it is considered one of the books that defined Wall Street during the 1980s, along with Bryan Burrough and John Helyar's Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, and the fictional The Bonfire of. Wall Street Poker Night is akin to a charity cocktail party that draws wealthy patrons, said Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, which rates charities for donors.
Historical Parallels
In a May 16, 2010 article, the Los Angeles Times revealed the aggressiveness with which Wall Street is pursuing poker experts. Danon Robinson, a partner at Toro Trading, was quoted saying that “if someone’s been successful at poker then there’s a good chance they could be successful in this business.” In fact, Robinson said, lack of interest in poker was “a red flag” and “almost the equivalent of not reading the Wall Street Journal.” Hedge fund executive Aaron Brown, meanwhile, said that Wall Street trading requires a steely maturity in the face of risk that is difficult to acquire “unless you put the money on the table at some point in your life.” Rich Blake described a similar intangible in a 2007 ABC News article when he spoke of a “penchant for risk-taking and a dispassionate regard for large sums of money.”
Today’s traders are not the first to spot parallels between gambling skills and trading instincts. In the 1989 classic Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis introduces readers to Howie Rubin. Rubin, bored with being a chemical engineer, taught himself to count cards and parlayed $3,000 into $80,000 over the course of two years in Las Vegas. Using his skill in blackjack (which is among the few “non-independent outcome games” in the casino), Rubin became a star trader in Salomon Brothers’ mortgage trading department. According to Rubin, “the trading floor at Salomon Brothers felt like a casino “because it required making bets and handling risk “in the midst of a thousand distractions.”
Poker-Themed Training Programs
(dupo-x-y)
Some Wall Street firms are going so far as to make poker an integral part of their training programs. Susquehanna International Group, based in Philadelphia, actually issues poker texts such as Hold ‘Em Poker and The Theory of Poker as mandatory reading. The former, described as the “first definitive work on hold’em poker”, was published in 1976 and aims to educate beginners on the basics of the game. Topics covered include the importance of position, key “flops,” semi-bluffing, strategies before the flop, the free card and how to read hands. The Theory of Poker, meanwhile, is a more sophisticated and intellectual treatment of poker fundamentals. Written by poker pro David Sklansky, the book “discusses theories and concepts applicable to nearly every variation” of poker. The value of deception, psychology, heads up play, implied odds and even game theory are thoroughly covered from the standpoint of an aspiring poker player. Additionally, readers are introduced to the Fundamental Theorem of Poker and how it affects game play.
After digesting these books, new hires at Susquehanna are asked to spend a full day each week absorbing poker concepts – by actually playing the game competitively. When asked about the rationale for this unorthodox training approach, program director Pat McCauley said “we are trying to teach people how to be good decision-makers under uncertainty.” That said, the poker-based training at Susquehanna is not just footloose and fancy-free fun and games. Rather, the training program and its poker games are run in a methodical and systematic manner. “It’s not the stereotypical stuff with bluffing”, McCauley insists – “it’s real science”
Poker On The Rise
(Yannick Croissant)
Luckily for Wall Street, poker’s popularity appears to be soaring. On March 28, Poker News Team reported that the TV show High Stakes Poker had seen a dramatic rise in ratings, including a 27% jump among adults 18-49 years old. Ratings among men aged 25-54 (said to be the target audience of the show) are said to have risen by 25%. The Los Angeles Times (citing research from PokerAnalytics) revealed that 6.8 million people played “at least one hand of online poker for money” in 2009 – a 29% increase over 2008 and roughly three times 2005’s poker participation. From the standpoint of Wall Street’s investment houses, the surge in poker’s popularity represents a growing crop of future hires who are both comfortable placing large “bets” and undeterred by occasional losses.
Poker Games Rules
Furthermore, Wall Street offers an opportunity that few hardcore poker junkies can resist – higher stakes and upside. A professional trader routinely makes trades worth several million dollars each. Make more good trades than bad, and you’ll be rewarded with a lucrative year-end bonus. At any rate, it appears that Wall Street’s once-impenetrable barrier of connections, degrees and business experience is crumbling on the altar of raw poker ability.
Related
A simplified version of Scopa contributed by Dan Beebe - not to be confused with the poker variant Wall Street.
The goal of Wall Street is to win the most points by gaining Investors, gathering Preferred Stock, and Common Stock, and by making 'Takeovers.'
Players and Cards
Wall Street may be played by 2, 3, or 4 players. Each player plays individually, i.e., there are no partnerships. The play goes clockwise around the table. A standard pack of cards is used, with the 7s, Jacks, Queens, and Jokers removed, leaving 40 cards. Each card is worth its face value during the play, except for the kings which are called 'Investors' and which are worth 7 during the play. The diamond cards (excluding the diamond Investor) are called 'Preferred Stock.' The rest of the cards (excluding the 4 Investors) are called 'Common Stock.'
The Deal
Choose a dealer, who then shuffles the cards. The dealer's left hand opponent then cuts the deck. The Dealer deals three cards face down to each player, moving clockwise around the table. The Dealer then deals four cards, face up, onto the middle of the table. If there are more than two 10's in the middle, the cards are thrown in and a new deal takes place.
The Play
Wall Street Poker Rules Card Game
The player to the dealer's left plays first, and the turn to play passes clockwise, until all of the cards in the players' hands have been played. A turn consists of playing one card face up to the table, which may capture one or more table cards. In the event of a capture, both the played card and the captured card(s) are taken and stored face down next to the player in his 'Fund.' If there is no capture, the played card remains face up on the table. In either case, the turn then passes to the next player.
If the value of the card played matches that of the table card, then the table card is captured and put into the player's Fund. If the card played matches more than one table card, then only one of the matching table cards is captured and placed in the Fund, and the player must choose which. If the card played does not match any table card, but its capture value is equal to the sum of the captured cards' values, then the set of cards is captured and placed in the Fund. If the capture value of the card played does not match any table card or sum of table cards, then there is no capture and the played card remains face up on the table.
There is no obligation to play a card which makes a capture. If a player has more than one card in his hand, he may choose to play a card which does not capture anything and simply add that card to the table. If the played card does make a capture, the captured cards must be taken. If a card matches both a single card and a sum of cards, the single card must be taken, not the group.
After each player has played all 3 cards in his hand, that round is over, and the dealer deals three more cards to each player. In the final round, after all the cards from the players' hands have been played, the last player who made a capture also takes any face up cards remaining on the table.
The Scoring
There are three points available to be won on each deal:
- The Investors. A point is won by whichever player takes the plurality of the 4 Investors (i.e. more investors than any other single player). If there is no plurality (two or more players tie for most investors), this point is not awarded.
- The Preferred Stock. A point is won by whichever player takes the plurality of the Preferred Stock (the diamonds, excluding the diamond Investor, which leaves 9 cards). If there is no plurality, this point is not awarded.
- The Common Stock. A point is won by whichever player takes the plurality of the 27 Common Stock cards. If there is no plurality, this point is not awarded.
The Takeover
In addition to the points mentioned above, you also win a point for each Takeover. You score a Takeover when you play a card which captures all of the table cards, leaving the table empty. The capturing card is placed face up in the Fund, so that the number of Takeovers can easily be seen when the scoring is done at the end of the play. Taking the last cards from the table at the end of a hand never counts as a Takeover, even if the last card played by the dealer does actually capture all the remaining table cards.
Winning the Game
The first player to win 10 or more points at the end of a hand wins. If two or more players win 10 points in the same hand, the player with the most points wins. If they are equal, those two players play another hand to determine the winner (and the other player(s) do not play in this extra round).
Wall Street Poker Rules Against
Strategy
Wall Street Poker Rules Online
Although the game is similar to Scopa, the point system changes the strategy needed to win. A player should count the investors and preferred/diamond stock and common stock as they are taken. Once a majority of any category is taken, there is no value in trying to capture those cards during the play. Thus, a savvy player will be aware once 5 diamond cards have been taken, and focus on capturing common cards or investors, allowing the less skilled player to take the remaining diamonds. As such, remembering which cards have been captured is much more important than in Scopa, where cards count toward different points (i.e., capturing the 7 of diamonds in Scopa counts as a point by itself, and contributes toward getting the prime point, the diamonds point, and the point for most cards). In Wall Street, there is no point for gaining the diamond Investor, so no single card has pre-eminent value, thus reducing slightly the extent to which luck affects the game.
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