Barry Carter hasn't played a video game in 13 years, so what would he make of the new eSport the poker community is embracing?

ElkY is a poker and Hearthstone pro

I’ve written a lot over the last year about how poker is reestablishing itself as an eSport rather than a sport or casino game. Gamers are seeing the potential of poker as a video game, poker players are embracing things like Twitch and the industry is seeing the value in the ‘gamification’ of poker.

One video game in particular has come on to poker’s radar recently, and that is Hearthstone. Last week there was a poker and Hearthstone crossover tournament, ElkY has been sponsored to play it and even Daniel Negreanu is a fan.

Stylistically it is very much like World of Warcraft (from which it evolved) with dragons and elves and spells and such, but it is essentially a heads-up card game, a hybrid of poker, top trumps and Magic The Gathering. If you have played the beta version of Hold’em X, it is very similar to that too.

I felt I couldn’t continue writing about this marriage of poker and eSports without dipping my toes in the water a little, so I recently dived right into playing Hearthstone. Other than poker, I haven’t played a video game in about 13 years (I’m 36, ie. ancient, and that game was Grand Theft Auto: Vice City), so I'm very much a fish out of water.

A minute to learn, a lifetime to master

KidPoker

I could try and explain how to play Hearthstone, but the best advice would be to just download it and jump right in. Like poker it is one of those games that is easy to learn (and free to download), and two minutes of playing it will be very self explanatory, much more than having to read the basic concepts here. I personally spent the first five minutes telling myself how stupid the whole thing was, but after that I was hooked (so much so that a week later I ended up putting a blocker on my laptop to stop me playing during work hours).

The central premise is that you are trying to kill your opponent before they kill you. You are armed with a number or random cards, and draw more every round. These cards include direct attacks, minions (who are soldiers you can use to attack every round until they are killed) and a number of spells which do all manner of things from healing, drawing more cards, freezing opponents and so on.

The similarities with poker are not immediately apparent, but as you learn the game it becomes clear that it is the random nature of the cards where you will find the most common ground. You have no idea what you will be dealt, so you need to be able to adapt your battle plan. You could be dealt some really valuable aggressive cards and dispatch of your opponent with ease, you could get dealt weak rags and struggle, and you could do everything right only for your opponent to get dealt that figurative Ace in the Hole and beat you.

A constantly evolving game

The deck constantly evolves

Where it differs greatly from poker is the way in which the game constantly evolves. The more you play, the more your characters develop and earn new potential cards to play with. There are hundreds of potential cards, each with different and more complex properties, that keeping track of them all is a skill in itself. This means adaptation is a huge skill, as beating one opponent requires different approaches to beating others. New cards are created all the time, so even if you have the game mastered today, the game will be different next year.

The game has a ranking system like in chess, so you can always find yourself against players around your own level, so you can gradually develop your game.

Like poker it takes a minute to learn and no doubt a lifetime to master. I’m too much of a Hearthstone fish to make a good judgement on which of the games is tougher. I would lean towards poker, not because of the game itself, but the ability of the top players. It is clear, however, that Hearthstone is fundamentally a more complex game, in that it has so many more moving and evolving parts.

Learn it at least for prop bets

A very addictive game

I got addicted to Hearthstone very quickly. Part of me thinks this is because I haven’t played a video game in 13 years, so I was probably going to fall in love with anything vaguely modern, but as a poker player it felt very much like the first time I played Triple Draw – familiar enough to Hold'em yet also novel enough to appeal to me on a number of different levels.

The big difference, of course, is that there isn’t real money play in Hearthstone, however, as a fun distraction or indeed as an excuse to play for prop bets, I’d recommend it to all poker players. We are probably going to see more of it over the next few years in poker as well as other games like it, so why not download it, add ‘DaveShoelace#2270’ to your friends list and let this 36 year old enjoy a very brief moment where he might be better than the average poker player?

Do you play Hearthstone? Do you prefer it to poker? Let us know your views on the game in the comments.

Barry Carter Barry Carter is the editor of PokerStrategy.com and the co-author of The Mental Game of Poker 1 & 2. Twitter

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