Slahal

Slahal Lahal is the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast gambling game known as stickgame, bonegame, bloodless war game, handgame, or a name specific to each language. It is played throughout the western United States and Canada by indigenous peoples. The name of the game is a Chinook Jargon word. The name bone game comes from the fact that the bone sets historically used were the shin bones from the foreleg of a deer or other animal.

The game is played with two opposing teams. There are two sets of bones, and two sets of sticks 10 sticks per team during aboriginal times, but in modern times usually played with 5 sticks per team and a kick or king stick -- an extra stick won by the team who gets to start the game in some areas a kick stick is not used. When a game is in play, one of the two teams will have two sets of bones, shown above. When your team is guessing, your objective is to get the right bone, the one without the stripe. When you have the bones, your objective is to make sure the other team guesses wrong on the bones set. When the other team guesses wrong, you gain a point. When a team has the two sets of bones, two separate individuals will hide the bones and swap them around from hand to hand each person has a striped and non-striped bone. Eventually the bones are brought forward, but are concealed as to not show the other team what one has a stripe on it. The game is usually accompanied by drumming and singing used to boost the morale of the team. The side that has the bones sings, while the other tries to guess. The musical accompaniment is also sometimes used to taunt the other team. Gambling could be done by players, or spectators of a match, placing bets on teams, or individual matches within the game between one guess and the other team's bone hiders.

Oral histories indicate that slahal is an ancient game, dating to before the last ice age.citation needed In the Coast Salish tradition, the Creator gave stickgame to humanity as an alternative to war at the beginning of time. Thus the game straddles multiple roles in Native culture -- it is at once entertainment, a family pastime, a sacred ritual and a means of economic gain through gambling. These juxtapositions are sometimes difficult to comprehend for the Western mind, but to many members of the Native community they are woven together effortlessly as a harmonic whole.

Duplicate Poker

 

Duplicate poker is a variant of the popular card game poker. Duplicate poker is based on the principles of Duplicate Bridge but also involves some of the rules used for playing pot limit and no limit Texas hold'em.

Duplicate poker is a skill-based game in which there are two or more tables consisting of the same number of players. Each table is dealt with an identically shuffled deck of cards. Every player holds the same hand as the person seated in identical seats at other tables.

All players begin each hand with the ability to bet the same number of playing chips, regardless of prior performance in the previous rounds.

The object of Duplicate poker is to win more chips than your opponents sitting in corresponding seats at other tables. Ultimately, the winner is decided based on the total number of chips accumulated up until the end of the game, as compared with those held by all players in the same seats at the other tables. Conceivably, even a player who loses chips overall can win at the game if that player loses fewer chips than his opponents.

Duplicatepoker.com, the first poker room to use the format, closed down on October 5th 2008, citing the global financial crisis as the reason for the removal of services. It had previously been popular due to the fact that as a skill-based game it was legal in the U.S. While the game is more conducive to an automated online format because of pre-set decks and the need to record accurate scoring, Duplicate poker has also been played in a live format. The first-ever Duplicate poker tournament was held in April 2007 at the Cherokee Casino in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Card Game Rules

Any specific card game imposes restrictions on the number of players. The most significant dividing lines run between one-player games and two-player games, and between two-player games and multi-player games. Card games for one player are known as solitaire or patience card games.  Generally speaking, they are in many ways special and atypical, although some of them have given rise to two- or multi-player games such as Spite and Malice.

In card games for two players, usually not all cards are distributed to the players, as they would otherwise have perfect information about the game state. Two-player games have always been immensely popular and include some of the most significant card games such as piquet, bezique, sixty-six, klaberjass, gin rummy and cribbage. Many multi-player games started as two-player games that were adapted to a greater number of players. For such adaptations a number of non-obvious choices must be made beginning with the choice of a game orientation.

One way of extending a two-player game to more players is by building two teams of equal size. A common case is four players in two fixed partnerships, sitting crosswise as in whist and contract bridge. Partners sit opposite to each other and cannot see each other's hands. If communication between the partners is allowed at all, then it is usually restricted to a specific list of permitted signs and signals. 17th century French partnership games such as triomphe were special in that partners sat next to each other and were allowed to communicate freely so long as they did not exchange cards or played out of order.

Another way of extending a two-player game to more players is as a cut-throat game, in which all players fight on their own, and win or lose alone. Most cut-throat card games are round games, i.e. they can be played by any number of players starting from two or three, so long as there are enough cards for all.

For some of the most interesting games such as ombre, tarot and skat card game, the associations between players change from hand to hand. Ultimately players all play on their own, but for each hand, some game mechanism divides the players into two teams. Most typically these are solo games, i.e. games in which one player becomes the soloist and has to achieve some objective against the others, who form a team and win or lose all their points jointly. But in games for more than three players, there may also be a mechanism that selects two players who then have to play against the others.