Presidential Poker: A Whole New Game
9 years ago
03 Aug
For all of you poker fans who believe politics is just some kind of absurd game, or for those whose home games have seen heated discussions over Trump and Clinton (the ‘bottom pair’ of potential presidents!) then Illinois man Alex Gary has the perfect solution – Presidential Poker – which sees the US Presidency turned into a multi-faceted game with a little of something for everyone!
The Democrat supporter from Rockport decided the current political climate was perfect for his new version of poker, one which sees players only having 43 cards to play with since the USA is 9 President’s short of a full deck! And no, that’s not a nasty euphemism!
From now until January 20, everybody’s talking about the presidency,” said the game’s inventor. “Will it be Trump or will it be Hillary? And so now it’s a perfect time to come out with a game based on presidents.”
The ranking of the cards allows for a twist to the normal rules of the game, however, with certain ‘low’ hands containing strong President’s defeating bigger hands full of lesser POTUS’s.
This is because Gary factored in 19 historical rankings of presidents dating back to 1948 and assigned points to each president – scored from 1 to 43. According to the game’s website:
That means a straight of historically bad presidents will lose to a pair of good-to-great presidents.”
As something of a presidential historian, Alex Gary explained the thinking behind his scoring system:
My ranking of Presidents is going to be different than yours,” he stated to local reporters. “It's going to be vastly different than my conservative friends. I wanted to create a ranking that was 100 percent fair and not just saying this is you because I want Republicans, I want conservatives, I want Libertarians, I want Green Party people to buy this game.”
The premise behind the game states that:
There are just 43 presidents (although historians count Grover Cleveland twice), soon to be 44, so the deck has just 43 cards. There also are just three suits, Republicans, Democrats and Other. The others are the old-timers, Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, Whigs and one Union president. Playing Presidential Poker is a fun twist on regular poker.“
Gary explains further:
You have to consider poker hands AND points as well as re-learn obscure presidents you long ago forgot or argue about the rankings of the ones you remember and admire - or hate.”
So who are at the top of Presidential Poker’s scoring list? The top 5 are Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt, while the lowest-scoring 5 are Andrew Johnson, William Henry Harrison, Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding, and James Buchanan.
This leaves all of our most recent leaders somewhere in the middle of the pack: so a straight of Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush Senior and Ronnie Reagan is pretty much a run of the mill hand. My top pair of Washington and Jefferson might just be inclined to raise you on the river!
Quite how to play with a 43-card deck wasn’t clear to me, but the $9-95 set of cards comes with its own instruction manual. Here are a few possibilities for the political poker player’s next home game.
- Presidential hold-em: The key difference here is that on the flop you turn over two cards and not three. Since Presidential Poker has just 43 cards then in the end of Presidential hold-em you'll have six cards - the two in your hand, the two on the flop, the turn and the river.
- 4-card draw and 5-card draw: Since there are just 43 cards in the deck, you need just four cards for a straight and four cards for a flush. So you can play 4-card draw, which will be harder to put together complex hands, or you can play 5-card draw.
- 6-card stud: In this game, you deal two cards down, three cards up and then the final card down. Since there are six cards, you can have six-card straights and flushes. With more cards, higher point totals will be needed to be sure of victory.
- 3-card poker: This is a newer card game, created in 1994, that combines the elements of poker with casino games. You can play 3-card poker with Presidential Poker with the point totals deciding the winner rather than the traditional poker hands.
Whether poker politicos Daniel Negreanu or Mike Matusow will ever become fans of the game I don’t know, but it certainly makes for an interesting change for the regular player.
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