You-Read-It-Here-First

[brian-hansen]

A recent posting about auctions in this forum made me realize
that I haven't posted about something that surprised me when I
"discovered" it about a year ago - that the structure of poker is
analogous to an auction.

My apologies to those who have recognized this already, but there
are several interesting offshoots to thinking of poker this way.

In particular, bets in poker correspond to bids in an
auction. One special feature of this auction is that there can be
multiple "winners". The winners of the auction are bidding on the
chance to prove that their hand will be valued more highly than
the others. Of course, if there is only one winner, then there is no
need to provide such a proof.

Poker has a rigid"round robin" ordering of bids, which contributes
a great deal to the strategy of play. To see this, consider playing
a game in which the order of bids was not constrained in this way.

The value of the thing to be bid on objectively increases with every
bid, in poker. There is no risk that what you bid on will be worth
less than your bid (if you win), but there *is* a risk that you will
need to surrender your bid if you lose.

Interestingly, you can play "poker" with different valuing functions
for determining the best hand. A fun example I came up with is
using the hand-valuing function of cribbage as the basis of the game.
Whoever has the best cribbage hand of those who stayed on to
the end would win the pot. Oddly, some friends I sprang this on
declined to play.