Gamers picking up poker had always surprised me, although more in terms of their choice of game rather than their success at it. Granted, the ability to make money is a pretty big draw (har), and it’s certainly competitive. I remember lakerman being one of the first to start the trend as well. Thresh too, if memory serves.

It’s funny how big it is amongst gaming communities now though. I’ve seen at least a few times where there will be a post on a competitive gaming forum about someone’s financial woes, and there’s always at least a handful of replies simply stating “pick up a poker how-to guide and start playing online”, as if it was instinctual to gamers. And of course teamliquid.net, the biggest english Starcraft site, has the sister site liquidpoker.net.

Funny to think about rage quitting being a good thing and saving yourself from a terrible night, hadn’t thought about that. Granted, even in that situational, calmly stepping away would be a lot better.

I’ll check out that article. I’ve actually been meaning to read more on poker since it’s such a fantastic resource for general strategy, especially meta-game and Yomi stuff.

Obviously since I’ve been pouring all my competitive nature into online poker for the last 3 years most of my thinking on the topic of skill and improvement revolve around it. I do see a heap of paralells between the mindset of top level FPS and RTS gamers and poker players. Obviously this is backed up by the online gamers who have turned their hand to poker and got rich; lakerman, rekrul, et al.

In poker “getting frustrated, ragequitting, and generally stuff that holds you back” is refered to as tilt. Rage quitting is actually the best kind of tilt since continuing to play when you’re not on your A game can be totally disasterous in poker, as opposed to just copping a smooshing around dm4.

If you’re interested in reading a wall of words written by a young online poker legend who I really respect, take the time to give this post regarding his thoughts on tilt a go:

http://blogs.cardrunners.com/internetpokers/when-lemons-give-you-life-make-lifenade

The tl;dr version is simply:

“Tilt is when your ability to perform is negatively affected by irrelevant past or future events. So focus on not letting irrelevant shit affect your thinking, but realise that for anyone who isn’t a robot/alien this is impossible. It’s your job to harness the energy of tilt into a positive, make it your fuel to improve the parts of your game you can control.”

It might be worth noting that the line of thought that spurred this article came from playing Quake Live. I’ve been playing it pretty consistently each night for the past few weeks. I’ve been trying to break out of age-old habits of mine (getting frustrated, ragequitting, and generally stuff that holds you back), and in doing so I have actually noticed my skill and game knowledge – even if subconscious – improving. Many many tiny little things, like on one map instead of chasing a guy around a corner, rocket jumping up to a neighboring ledge and shooting him from above – taking the height advantage, instead of catching his spam as he flees. Obviously if you play a game you’ll improve, but this is probably the first time where I actually noticed it.

Of course, all this improvement wouldn’t have been gained had I not spent the time to learn and employ it. After the past month though I feel pretty safe to say that I am at the top of my game in terms of Quake, which is a pretty interesting feeling having such an extensive history with the series.

I just spammed out a blog post with some added thoughts.

http://fuzzyslogic.blogspot.com/2009/03/time-investment-as-resource.html

Random elements was actually another topic that up until recently I’ve prejudiced against, but Sirlin showed me the light in how they can really be a great thing, and actually they may simply be the one thing that keeps gaming interesting. Unless it’s something silly like Warcraft 3′s damage values, but stuff like Starcraft’s height advantage (30% miss rate shooting something higher than you), it’s really good.

Definitely agreed re: satisfaction. And it’s easily viewable in the stuff the community puts out, as well… what’s more exciting, a quake frag video full of mid-air rockets, or a highlight of a rogue scoring a critical hit? Woo.

We are trying to bridge that gap a bit with Smashball (SHAMELESS PLUG: http://www.smashball.tv), where you can get XP which will grant you access to more skills (it currently has no impact other than front page stats because we’re still balancing), and eventually custom gear that gives you SLIGHT edges, and custom weapons that give you SLIGHT trade-offs. We’ve ‘balanced’ this by adding significant randomness to in-game effects, not normally found in an FPS. For example, having lower health gives you a higher CHANCE of getting knocked down or fumbling the ball, and getting knocked down more times in a round gives you a higher CHANCE of dying. I see this as distinct from the damage ranges you find in typical MMOGs, but perhaps I’m kidding myself.

On top of that, the way Smashball movement works is different from typical FPS games in that there is a fairly long learning curve, not unlike the crazy conc-jumping and bunnyhopping of QWTF and its ilk. The hook and the turbo give a skilled player the ability to traverse a lot more ground in a given period of time than an unskilled player. We are looking for ways to reduce this skill gap a little, but it’s needed in an E-sport IMO.

And yes, you still will never be able to touch a FPS player who spends 12 hours per day practicing, but to me it’s somehow less satisfying to get owned by a MMOG grinder than a highly skilled FPS player.