I decided to do my process project on the process of a No Limit Texas Hold ‘em game. I chose this game because I am extremely interested in the different paths, or patterns one goes through when playing the game. Also, i think it is challenging to depict a complex system such as poker through graphs. Furthurmore, I was curious as to whether the process of the game, which was simple, would also come out to be as complicated.

There are four different actions in the game: Fold, Check, Call, and Bet. I chose to follow three different players (including myself) in a 30 min part of a tournament. I tracked all the actions called out by the players: Martin, me, and Wesley, by using a tape recorder. Then, after the game was finished, I played back the tape, and recorded the actions of the three players in terms of hands played. I could not record it according to time because most actions were done simultaneously. (since we were next to each other, action follows almost immediately) Thus I thought it’d be nice to track by hands played instead of time so that we can see the pattern/variation of the action process within that one hand. I graphed the hands in terms of who won, or who stayed the longest of the three. The outermost circle represent the winner. Since it is a game of “hold’em” (the object of the game is to hold the cards the longest, hence the name), whoever held the cards the longest, is the winner.

After tracking each hand, I found that the variations make an interesting graph. (I chose to present my findings on a pie/circular graph instead of a traditional pie graph because the circular shape corresponds to a poker table and I thought that it’d be more interesting to look at. Some hands were static, where everyone folds, and others were dynamic, where there were many calling, raising, and folding, which made the graph more interesting.

One of the hardships of this project was that it was extremely confusing to sort out the actions of each player amongst all the talk and noise. (poker is a talkative
game)