Apologies to everyone for the long downtime today.

Our hosting provider had network connectivity issues that lasted for a few hours, and on top of that I had managed to reboot the server as an attempt to fix things (before knowing that it was just an issue with the network connection) without noticing that the web server had not started correctly. That added another few hours of down time after the connectivity issues had been fixed.

I believe this was the first time (in three years) we have had any downtime due to issues with the hosting company, so I don’t expect this to repeat very often.

Thank you for your patience while the service was down, and apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Teppo

Thanks everyone for another year of great poker games and increasingly tough opposition!

And congrats to OnlyOneMove for winning the Player of the Year title in NLHE – second year in a row!


Quick Update and Future Plans

As many of you may have noticed, there were no new features added in 2011 and no updates on the site, despite the long list of ideas I have collected throughout the years.

After 2010, which was also a year with relatively few updates, I used my firstborn as the excuse. And this time the excuse is my second daughter who is just 2 months old (the older one being 21 months now). So, there just hasn’t been much free time left for working on the site, as I’ve barely been able to keep up with the games I have going with all of you guys.

Therefore my only goal for 2012 is to finish the Android App for CP that I started a long time ago. And if I do end up having more free time, some other minor improvements may be done on the site too. No promises though.

As always, any feedback is much appreciated and everything you share will be taken into consideration. All good ideas will hopefully be implemented sooner or later (more likely "later" though due to the lack of time).

Thanks again for playing on the site and best of luck in 2012!

761de372b8c072eed339d6f59803e96f Hi Guys, I am newbie in the internet stuff and I dont know if I am writing on correct board on this website. I
have got problem with activating my account. I received email but when I click on the link it was not working, is this link is correct?  http://www.correspondencepoker.com/?d005e41fa110,

Hi crisdeb.

Welcome to the forums and to the site.

I have enjoyed playing with you, and I hope you will find the games here to be valuable learning tools that will help you become a better cash game player.

Best regards,

Teppo

this site would be ideal for duplicate poker. i.e. have an hour tournament with 10 hands against each opponent with results compared.  Also a great way to learn: see what others did on the same deal.
Duplicate poker was tried some years ago, but full table…just didnt work

Duplicate poker does have some benefit of reducing variance in the game, but I’m not so sure how to make it work well.

Unless I’m mistaken, I think the full table duplicate poker that once appeared online was an attempt to get around certain US gaming laws by claiming that it was a game of skill (and therefore legal) while regular poker was a game of luck (and therefore illegal). And because the motivation for creating duplicate poker was legislation rather than making it fun to play, it was actually pretty easy to predict it would never become popular. (And while this is irrelevant to our discussion, their whole claim that a format with slightly lower variance would be a "game of skill" while a version with slightly higher variance is a "game of luck" was absurd to me as well. But then again I’m a mathematician and not a lawyer so I wouldn’t really know if the claim could hold up in court or not…)

In heads-up games the duplicate format might work a lot better and actually be a lot fun to play that way, but to get the maximum variance-reducing benefit each player would need to play each hand multiple times, twice against each opponent (and play "both sides" of the same hands). And unfortunately that would not work because the players would then know what their opponents hold in certain hands where the board repeats and the player already played the other side of the hand.

A team of two players playing against another team of two players could be used to solve this particular issue (as it has in certain man vs. machine match-ups), but only if you can trust that the players are honest and don’t share their hands with their team mates.

I do agree though that this could be a great format for Correspondence Poker if there was a way to guarantee the honesty of the game, but cheating would also be so easy that I’m not sure if I’d enjoy playing this format against people that I didn’t already know and trust. In private tournaments, or some other similar setups, this might be a fun way to play though.

It might also be possible to come up with some other "semi-duplicate" formats, for example where the whole cards were duplicated but boards were not (to prevent knowing what your opponent holds on a board you’ve already seen), but that would have it’s own complications too and not be as trivial as it may sound at first. And in case the variance was reduced only slightly but not significantly, it might not even be worth it anyways if it just made the game more complicated with little added benefit.

If you do have any other ideas, either regarding the duplicate poker format or something else, please feel free to share them here. I will keep the duplicate poker idea in mind in case we can figure out a cool way to implement it. And in any case, thank you so much for sharing the idea, Bill.