Basic Poker BIF Info

This subreddit is dedicate to organizing and playing Poker BIF games.

First off, I should explain the concept. For each game, participants will be playing a small tournament style game of Texas Hold'em poker using pokerstars.net. Each player will ante a beer, and the losers will ship their beers to the winners.

For the Poker BIF, each player will ante up their beer. The minimum requirements are 22oz of good beer. Each person must submit before the start of play what beer they will be anteing.

Requirements to Play

The only real requirement to play is that each player must have at least 2 completed trades via r/beertrade or 5 documented, completed trades from the Beer Advocate or Rate Beer forums. This reputation check is to prevent scams, no ships, etc.

Guidelines for beers

• Each beer ante should be somewhere between 20+ dollars in value or have some rarity/trade value. This makes it reasonable to ship and interesting to play without breaking the bank.

• Limited distribution beers are preferred to easy to find ones. While a large bottle of Duvel would fit all the the requirements, anyone can go to their local shop and buy one. Focus on beers with a small distribution area or limited production. Winners should be excited for the beers they will receive.

• The beer should be highly rated. In general, a score of over 90 on BeerAdvocate is a good. This is more of a guideline than a hard and fast rule.

• Antes may consist of more than one beer. The minimum is 22 ounces, so assuming they meet the rest of the criteria, 2 12oz bottles is perfectly acceptable.

• You are expected to have your beer shipped out within one week from the date of the game. If you will take longer than seven days to get your box out, please contact the person receiving your box to make arrangements.

How the game works

The games will be played via Pokerstars and their Home Game function. For those who may be concerned, Pokerstars offers free money play (and only free money play for those in America), so you will absolutely not have to provide credit card or other personal information to the site. The client can be downloaded here. Just follow the link and click download.

Once the client is downloaded and you have set up an account, the next step is to join the Reddit BIF Home Game club. To do this, go to the "Home Games" tab, click "Join Club", enter "651112" for the Club ID and "1123581321" for the invitation code. You are now a member of the club! Any upcoming games will be available on the schedule. I do recommend that you register for any game you are playing well ahead of time, up to two weeks before the start of play. You can always unregister, and this way if you are running a little bit late you can still play. Just make sure you have your client open and are logged in at the start of play and you will be taken to your table automatically.

To register for any particular game, either PM me or respond to the appropriate post with your Pokerstars name and your ante.

For the time being, the games will be tournament style Texas Hold'em with 5,000 starting chips and 10 minute blind periods. The game should usually run about 2-3 hours. This worked well for the inaugural game but we can change the style of poker in the future if there is interest.

How winning works

I have created a payout structure which is available here and on the sidebar. The numbers across the top of the spreadsheet represent the number of entrants. The numbers down the left side represent the finishing place of each player. The cells are colored to indicated which players will be sending beer and who they will be sending to. If the place has a number in it, that is the number of beers the person will be receiving. The beers will be sent from the losers of the same color to the winner. For example, if there is a game with 9 players altogether, the person who comes in first will get three beers, one each from the players that came in 7th, 8th, and 9th. The player who comes in the second will be sent beers from the players who came in 5th and 6th. The player who comes in third will be sent a beer from the person who came in forth.

Affiliations

Also worth noting, this subreddit is unofficially related to r/beertrade as we will be using the reputation points from there to determine eligibility for play. All bad trades or issues with reputation points will be handled as per r/beertrade guidelines. Do not message the mods for reputation points for your trade! The player list will be submitted to the beertrade mods and each player will receive one rep point.