The goal is to play the hand better than the others either by gaining the most chips or losing the least.
There is a point system that gives you points or deducts points from your score accordingly at the end of each hand and can range from no points gained/lost if you all came away with equal stacks to a huge gain or loss if you have substantially more or less chips than the other. Your score is carried from hand to hand but your chips are replenished each hand. For instance, in the hand above, I made a big laydown while the other 2 players with my hand ended up with all their chips in the middle and lost. Even though I folded, I was rewarded with a boost to my score for ending the hand with the most chips.The whole idea is that if you play better than the other players, even if you're card dead or cold decked and it would normally be a losing session, you come out as the winner because you played the same hands better than they did. If you got a terrible run of cards in a normal game and lost $100 but played excellently, you'd still be considered a loser for that session. Duplicate Poker remedies this by showing, even though you lost, the other players lost even more due to their poor play and awards you as the winner through it's points system for good play.
I sat down today and checked out the software and played in a 50-man play money tourney to see how the whole thing works. First off, the software isn't where it needs to be. You can't maximize the screen just like Full Tilt and that's a nuissance. The layout is also fairly plain.
However, the worst thing about it is the time it takes to play a hand. Every table competing against each other has to wait for everyone to finish before the next street. That is, you close the action preflop and you wait....every table finishes and the flop comes....the action is closed and you wait...everyone finishes and the turn comes....etc etc. This is a quite annoying when everyone folds to 1 person but you still have to wait the 2 minutes or whatever for all tables to finish. It's not a flaw in the software, just a annoyance that is intrinsic to the game.
I played as I normally would in a tourney and managed to stay in the top ten most of the time. I questioned how it just much skill it rewarded at times when I would fold a hand like 83o against a raise, only to see two pair or trips come up that would have been made and actually lose points because one guy with 83o called the pre-flop raise and stayed in to win it. I assumed it would even out over time as it did. The thing that did bother me was that, even though we all share the same hands, we don't share the same opponents. What if one table is passive and a player with 78 suited gets to see the flop cheaply and make a flush sometimes, but another player with 78 at a different table has a hard time because everyone is raising and re-raising? The player that makes the flush would take a chunk of chips from the other, even though calling a huge raise was clearly wrong. This wouldn't be a good comparison in skill.
I think that it's a novel idea that is, perhaps, before its time. One day, someone may create a more polished game of poker that is purely skill, but we just aren't quite there yet. Even so, it's a nice take on the game we love and I'd suggest trying it out at least once. Just go to e-PokerUSA.
As far as the tournament, on the second to last hand I held AKo and made a very small raise of about 2 1/2x the big blind, something I often do with AK pre-flop when the blinds aren't high. The flop was very bad for me and I folded out quickly. My neighbors with the AK managed to get it all in preflop and lost in spectacular fashion. I gained a huge amount of points (victory chips) and went on to finish 3rd. The best part of the experience was they awarded real money in a play money tourney, albeit was only $1.25
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