To play the game, first, you need to know about a regular Texas holdem. Texas Hold’em’s a card game with four times to bet. Everybody gets two cards, and there are five more cards on the table. You can choose to drop out, match the bet, or raise during the betting times. The point is to make the best hand you can with your cards and the ones on the table. The person with the best hand wins. The dealer button moves around the table, and your goal is to win chips from the others.
But in this version:
Alongside the regular number cards, there are also “action cards” mixed into the deck, in order to add a twist to the gameplay.
Players have the freedom and are encouraged to use these action cards at any point during the game. when a player decides to play an action card, they must draw another card from the deck, to keep the same number of cards in their hand.
Betting:
Also, in this version, you are not betting with chips. Instead, you are betting with the parts of your body. For example, If I have a good hand, I may raise the bets to 1 eye. At the end of the round, the one with the strongest hands can keep his/her bets, while the other players can’t use one of his eyes for the rest of the game. The player loses the game when the player is unable to continue playing with no eyes or no fingers.
Artist statement:
This project is inspired by the appropriations in the Dada movement. This project reflects the Dadaist approach of taking existing objects and recontextualizing them to create unexpected art. There were lots of appropriations about chess during the movement, for example, Yoko Ono’s Play It by Trust, Takako Saito’s Sound Chess, and Spice Chess. My initial idea was to combine poker with UNO, so the cards dealt were UNO instead. But when I searched “Poker * UNO” on Google, I found someone in this class had a similar idea and already posted it in 2016. Therefore instead of UNO, I combined it with action cards. Those action cards brought more randomness and strategies to poker. Players in this game can also use action cards at any time, altering the gameplay in unexpected ways. This is also a kind of appropriation as Dada art often featured unexpected and irrational elements.