Texas Fold 'Em

Among the many XBox and XBox 360 games that very generously came with the 360 when I bought it off Boneman's father-in-law late last year was something called XBox Live Arcade Unplugged. I'd pretty much ignored it until recently, at which point I decided to see what was on it. There were a handful of arcade-y games, the type which Vicki sometimes enjoys. She and I tried out a few, with nothing really all that captivating.

Then I decided to see what Texas Hold 'Em was like, which is also on that disk. I've watched enough No Limit Texas Hold 'Em poker matches on TV - though only a small fraction of what my wife records and follows faithfully on our Tivo box upstairs - to know how to play, so I gave it a try. I've stuck to single player only, tournament-based, and just the Invitational mode (no buy-in required). You start off with a certain amount of play money and the point is to grow it so that you can enter into the more expensive competitions (requiring buy-ins of large amounts of pretend money). I've played in about ten Invitational matches so far, winning twice, finishing 2nd a couple of times, 3rd once and then out of the money (4th through 8th) the rest of the time. It's quite fun, and (sadly) addictive!

I suspect that playing against AI opponents in this game is much like it is in other video arenas: you can kid yourself into thinking that you're actually pretty good, like how I can currently push the other "players" to fold most of the time when I want them to, allowing me to get better and better results at it. And then you go off and face other humans and you quickly realize that you actually still totally suck! So I haven't got any delusions about being able to play poker for real... but it's still fun as a video game!