Germany Wins First Nations Cup

After two days of play, Germany was declared the winner of the first ever Nations Cup, a duplicate poker competition held by the International Federation of Poker. The tournament, which featured 12 teams from around the world – including one team representing an online poker giant – competed in two days of play in order to crown a champion.

The German team won the final round of the competition, coming just ahead of teams from Brazil and France. Team Zynga, representing the players of the free poker game millions play on Facebook, finished a surprisingly strong fourth, ahead of favorites like the United States and United Kingdom.

Germany featured a roster of several strong players, including Tobias Reinkemeier, Sebastian Ruthenberg, Moritz Kranch, Hans Martin Vogl and Sandra Naujoks. Brazil and France actually tied in second place on the tournament’s point system, but Brazil took second place based on the team’s total chip count at the end of the event. Holland finished 5^th, while Spain took 6^th place.

The tournament was designed to put players to the test in a format that would eliminate as much of the luck factor from poker as possible. Thus, a duplicate poker format was created, based on the duplicate bridge tournaments that are popular in competitive forms of that game.

The idea is simple: players from the same team sit at different tables, as well as at different seats at each table. However, each table players a series of identical hands, with the player in the same seat on each table receiving the same hole cards, while the community cards are also identical. In theory, this puts each team on an absolutely even playing field, since every team will have a player playing at each seat somewhere in the tournament.

The tournament format had to quickly be reworked after an error by organizers at the end of Day 1. While the plan was to cut the 12 teams down to six, tournament officials lost some data from hands played late in the day. As a result, all 12 teams were instead invited back to play on Day 2.