pile up poker

I think PUP is my favorite puzzmo game. It's a nice mix of strategy and randomness and is very satisfying to play. It's also good because you get to play four regular tables and one Big table every day, unlike the other games with just one (or two now, with my second favorite, flipart)

I like to think I'm Pretty Okay™ at the game; I've gotten some pretty high scores before (altho never truly spectacular afaik; I don't usually look at the leaderboards but when I do they are... Big Numbers) and have gotten the joys of fantasyland five times according to my screenshots (I'm trying to take a pic of each one in the hopes of learning what makes ideal patterns to set up going there, but there's a big caveat there that is the point of this post:). What has really struck me, and especially thru fantasyland tables, is sometimes you just get Really Bad tables. Not individual hands, but the full table. Your max possible score might be only 8k in a hand, even if you played Perfectly, while another table might be 18 or even possibly 20k (I've never broken that, but it's apparently possible). Sometimes you get the cards to put down two straight flushes and one of those can be in the corners while another is in discard and still get a good number of straights and threes of a kind to fill the rest of the table with good hands. Other times you're given 0 straight flushes, or the best way to use the one is in the corners or not even there while the discard hand is relegated to a flush or two pair.^[1] With fantasyland, you can kinda see if it's gonna be a Big Hand from the getgo. With regular play, you likely will miss some Truly Great plays because you're fed one hand at a time and don't know what's coming.

I think someone might read this and go "yeah, right, you just gotta go with the hand you've been dealt and make do, that's a good advice for life" but actually what I'm saying here is just directly to me right now and very specifically: sometimes your hand sucks in puzzmo.com's pile up poker and it's not your fault and you don't have to Be The Best at a game that is very much random in a way your skill can never actually compensate for completely. It's no surprise at all that some tables only come out to like, 2k total.