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09.21.06
An Open Letter To Paul Phillips
posted by Absinthe | 4:10 PM
Mr. Phillips:
I write this here not because I flatter myself a frequent contributor to your stream of consciousness – I don’t – but because of its relative permanence and ease of access here, as opposed to burying it in the comments section of your LiveJournal, which as I don’t have one I think would require me to generate a nominal one anyway, and then I could be using a character string that might otherwise be reserved for someone who actually wants to be ‘pansyfied636′ or ‘incommunitardo’ or suchlike. That would simply not do. So this humble scribbler hopes that perhaps either the vagaries of a search-engine or the whims of a mutual acquaintance might direct you here.
I know you are a busy man, and so, to business. Mr. Phillips, the poker world, much as you might have expressed a desire to abandon it for new interests, happens to have need of an individual of just your particular talents and passions. (I am here of course speaking of the game that dare not spell its name, the pursuit of mastery of which you have of late devoted a great deal of your time and prodigious energies.)
Poker, in all its myriad variations, is at its best when played in rotation, a view which I think we share, given your choice to play the HORSE event at this years’ World Series while eschewing all others. With the sometimes bewildering mix of games available, however, it behooves all those who play to adopt standard mnemonics, so as to minimize the confusion caused by a change of games, or at least to ensure that the progression of the rotation continues in an intuitive fashion, whether it be CORPSE or HOSE or HOES or SHOE (the latter two obviously being functionally identical apart from the choice of game at inception, the second of four having only structural differences).
I thus propose the creation of a standardized Dictionary Of Rotational Poker (or DORP, n. village or hamlet), to be curated and managed primarily by yourself. This will be comprised of an alphabetical list incorporating all rotation games made possible by the sensible anagramming and acronyming of the letters representing the commonly-played variants of poker, subject to certain rules:
1. All rotations thus generated must represent actual words, though not necessarily ones in common usage. The SOWPODS list or other such authority would probably do, and I trust you are intimately familiar with it.
2. No game may be repeated in a rotation, which should greatly reduce the work at hand, as eliminating potential words in which vowels and consonants appear twice or more (TERROR, SCORCH, CHOPPER, et al) and, as you obviously will intuit, eliminating the possibility of words over nine to eleven characters in length, depending on whether you accept Draw and Mexican pokers as commonly-played variants, and ones that ought be introduced into the rotational lexicon; I trust your judgment in such matters.
The letters available at present are thus B, C, E, H, O, P, R, S, T and (provisionally) D and M. BORSCHT and PORCHES/PORSCHE thus emerge as untapped possibilities, as do POSTER/PRESTO/TROPES and ETHOS/THOSE. I am a novice in such matters and no doubt many more spring rapidly to your mind; I hope that, once engaged, you will find this task irresistible, and that the confluence of knowledges contained in your experience will thus be put to the benefit of all.
I remain your humble servant,
Ryan(NARY/YARN)
Popularity: 6% [?]
Topics: Poker | 13 Comments »
September 21, 2006 at 4:25 PM
Brilliant.
September 21, 2006 at 4:35 PM
CORSET/ESCORT/RECOST/SECTOR?
September 21, 2006 at 7:48 PM
Awesome…..best post ever….
I sure hope PP reads this.
September 21, 2006 at 10:19 PM
I agree – brilliant!!!!!!!!!!
September 22, 2006 at 5:07 AM
Sheer genius!
September 22, 2006 at 6:57 AM
Wicked CHOPS would probably sponsor a game!
Good stuff Yarn!
September 22, 2006 at 12:09 PM
TREBOR (my fave)
HOPERS (beginners tourney)
STROP (filled with bad beats, and Tuff_Fish)
STROBE (super turbo blinds)
September 22, 2006 at 10:10 PM
What I love about this post is that for some of us the Available Letters list is almost as inscrutable as the shorter Provisional list. No legend for the feeble-minded?
For those of us who found NLHE late in the day, and are not yet soul-wrenchingly weary of it, the concept of learning 3 – 7 new games is a tad overwhelming. Your noble pursuit of standardization a welcome assist in this otherwise daunting task.
I, Aksari / Irk Asia
September 25, 2006 at 7:53 AM
For they ambigiously gay crowd at that new “gays only” poker site…
HOT PECS
September 26, 2006 at 3:47 AM
Classic. But what’s ‘T’? (I’m assuming B=Badugi, C=Chinese poker, and P=crazy Pineapple.)
September 26, 2006 at 5:25 PM
B = Badugi
C = Crazy Pineapple
E = Seven-card Stud Eight-or-better
H = Hold’Em
O = Omaha (usually Omaha Eight-or-better)
P = Pineapple
R = Razz
S = Seven-card Stud
T = Triple Draw (2-7TD)
and provisionally
D = Draw (five-card)
M = Mexican poker (a five-card stud game common in SoCal cardrooms, as detailed here)
September 29, 2006 at 9:08 AM
Computers are better at this than I am. Words of 5+ letters from OWL2:
BCEHOPRST
BCEHOPRST + DM
I leave it to you to decide which of these will get a full game. I’m partial to SORBET myself.
January 8, 2007 at 10:36 PM
After revisiting this post several times (only because I really like it amagrams), I have come back for a suggestion to use all of the letters, not including D and M.
I offer:
BETS PORCH