Games!

Poker is my favorite game. It’s a beautiful game of incomplete information that requires a blend of math, statistics, psychology, deductive reasoning, and more (perhaps I should create a list of the microskills poker requires). My friends were interested in learning how to play poker, so I gave them a short tutorial on how to start a game of poker. Within short order, they figured out how the blinds work, the flop/turn/river, the hierarchy of hands, etc. They want to start a home game in August. Very excited!

Preview

Unlike poker, Chess is a game of complete information. Chess requires visualization, strategy, calculation, evaluation, tactics and more. Like poker, it requires many hours of play in order to master. Today, chess is one of the world‘s most popular games, played by millions.

Who doesn't like imagining that they're a real-estate developer with many millions in the bank and properties in their portfolio? Every player in this game gets to be the CEO of their own enterprise. Risk taking, good decision making, and a little bit of luck will usually get you in the winner's circle.

One of the oldest and most popular board games in the world! Backgammon requires you to move your checkers after a roll of two dice. Backgammon involves a combination of strategy and luck (from rolling dice). While the dice may determine the outcome of a single game, the better player will accumulate the better record over a series of many games. With each roll of the dice, players must choose from numerous options for moving their pieces and anticipate possible counter-moves by the opponent. The optional use of a doubling cube allows players to raise the stakes during the game.

It is considered the national game in many countries of the Eastern Mediterranean: Egypt, Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Greece. Like chess, backgammon has been studied with great interest by computer scientists. Owing to this research, backgammon software has been developed that is capable of beating world-class human players.

Battleship was one of the earliest games to be produced as a computer game, with a version being released for the Z80 Computer in 1979. Many computer editions of the game have been produced since. In Clubhouse Games for the Nintendo DS, Battleship is known as Grid Attack. It is played on a 7*7 grid and includes slight variations, such as four-player gameplay, and various ship sizes and shapes. Versions of Battleship appear as applications on numerous social networking services.

More popularly known as Jenga, Jumbling Tower is a block game. Players take turns removing one block at a time from a tower constructed of dozens of blocks. Each block removed is then placed on top of the tower, creating a progressively more unstable structure.