Liar’s Poker Guide | How To Play Liar’s Poker
Liar’s Poker Definition | Example | Tips | History
What is Liar’s Poker?
Liar’s Poker is a game traditionally played with the serial numbers on a US dollar bill.
It requires two or more players.
Each player takes a turn and uses their hand, the set of 8 numbers, to make a “bid” or claim about how many of a number are present across all player’s hands.
The first player to go makes an opening bid, say 4 5s, claiming there are 4 or more occurrences of the number 5 between their own hand and everyone else’s.
The next player must make a higher bid, say 4 6s, or challenge, claiming no, there are not that many out there. So players have two options – raise with a higher bid or challenge. When a bid is challenged by all other players a count is made to see if the bid was right or wrong. If enough or more of the number are present (e.g. there are in fact 4 or more 6s across all hands), the player that made the bid wins and loses otherwise.
A winning bid collects from all the other players while on a losing bid the bidder pays out to everyone else. It is a zero sum game (gains plus losses sum to zero). The final bidder, win or lose, keeps the turn and opens the next hand.
In terms of rank the most common practice is to use 1 as the lowest number and 0, representing 10, as the highest. A sample bid progression might look like 4 5s, 4 6s, 4 0s, 5 1s, 5 6s, 7 6s.
Liar’s Poker Example
Player1 55989160
Player2 26846059
Player3 89129080
Player4 69967695
############
Player1 opens with a bid of 3 6s, claiming there are 3 or more occurrences of a 6 across the 32 numbers (4 players times 8 numbers each)
Player2 bids 4 6s, claiming there are 4 or more 6s
Player3 challenges, claiming no, don’t think there are 4 6s
Player4 bids 5 6s
Player1 bids 5 9s
Player2 challenges
Player3 bids 6 9s
Player4 bids 7 9s
Player1 bids 8 9s
Player2 challenges
Player3 challenges
Player4 bids 9 9s
Player1 challenges
Player2 challenges
Player3 challenges
This ends the hand as everyone has challenged the 9 9s bid of Player4. When the count takes place the 9 9s bid does not succeed as there were only 8 9s across all the hands. Player4 goes down 3, losing 1 to each of the others.
Note that everyone gets at least one turn so the hand could just as easily have ended with Player1 making an opening bid and the other 3 all challenging. While this brute force method may work, starting out with lower bids and evaluating responses is an approach that may help suss information from other players, which of course may or may not be true. As the Liar’s Poker name implies, lying is part of the game.
Liar’s Poker Tips
Liar’s Poker is easy to play, just Bid, Challenge, or Count, but winning consistently may prove harder, especially among experienced competitors. It takes both skill and a little luck and, as in trading or other forms of gambling, rewards patience, discipline, and wits. Knowing when to bluff and sensing when others might be bluffing is critical. Mixing strategies to keep opponents off balance is also key. Sometimes it’s best to raise with a weak hand or conversely lay down with a strong one. Making those decisions effectively usually leads to success.
Liar’s Poker History
Bills, Paper Slips, Advanced rules, Mobile App, Artificial Intelligence?
Liar’s Poker, also referred to as LP, started out with dollar bills and there are references in popular culture as far back as the 1960s but it most likely came about earlier than that. One can imagine two friends bellying up to a bar, pulling out bills, and playing a hand or two to decide who picks up the tab. And there are myriad stories of those that keep “special” bills on tap, loaded with a particular number to gain advantage.
The first dollar bill, serial number 00000001, would make a great LP hand!
True LP aficionados would never play with stacked bills (shameful) let alone bills themselves – there simply aren’t enough to go around! With the advent of computers, random number generators to produce 8-digit Liar’s Poker hands became the way to go. A sample produced by an Excel spreadsheet RAND function is shown below. Arranged in five columns the numbers were indexed with letters to help players co-ordinate which row everyone was on. Grab a sheet and presto, 75 possible hands to play.
Around the same time a more advanced version of Liar’s Poker took root on Wall Street in the 1980s, in particular at the legendary trading house Salomon Brothers. A fuller examination of these enhancements will be the subject of a future article. Suffice it to say the changes dramatically added to the drama and suspense of play. So much so that LP sessions often lasted hours on end, late into the night. It was impossible not to notice a daily gathering of players around the firm’s most profitable trading desk, smack in the middle of the floor. The author Michael Lewis picked up on it and deftly titled his first book after the game, perhaps because it neatly encapsulates two base emotions that drive markets - fear and greed. First published in 1989, the book remains a best seller in the business category.
While certainly entertaining, conducting Liar’s Poker sessions manually - verifying counts, gains/losses, and which hand to play proved cumbersome, especially for less dexterous types. Fortunately the rise of internet connectivity and smartphone devices lent themselves to pushing the game forward. A nifty mobile app, Liars Poker Slips, mirrors the Salomon rules and automates the record-keeping, distilling the game to its essence and allowing players to focus on strategy. Better yet, it allows people to play remotely across the world wide web.
What does the future hold? Tournaments to find the world’s best players? Or an Artificial Intelligence (AI) program that can outplay people? While computers far exceed human brains in raw processing power, and have of course bested us in complex yet deterministic games like Chess and Go, it would be an interesting exercise to see how the algorithms fare against unflappable Liar’s Poker players that may be lying or not…
References
Liar’s poker app http://www.liarspokerslips.com
Liar’s poker book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar’s_Poker
Liar’s poker game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar’s_poker
Zero-sum game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game