1. Poker Flip Table
2. Flop Poker Game
3. Poker Flip Names

Continuing its trend of developing new ways to keep its players engaged, GGPoker unveils yet another innovative product dubbed Flip & Go.

Flip & Go is the operator’s unique tournament offering in which players flip every hand until they are eliminated or make it in the money, thus removing most pre-bubble play and getting players straight into the action.

Flip, in those days, was a favourite and fashionable liquor, especially among the New England settlers.Put into a quart of beer a tablespoonful of brown sugar, warm it thoroughly by stirring it round with a red hot poker. When the cards don't go your way, don't worry. GGCare is here and has your back! Daily $30,000 flipout tournaments to turn that frown, upside-down! Serious video poker players stay away from bars, booze and distractions and that's the key to making money playing video poker. Remember, these returns and percentages are based on thousands of hands of video poker. Play what you want to, with the best pay-tables.

The way the game works is that the entire field registered in the tournament is all-in until one player remains at each table. The survivors from each table are reseated moving immediately into the next round where every player is guaranteed a payout.

The tournament from there proceeds as normal with a standard betting structure, blinds increasing every 5 minutes, and players resuming with the chips they won at their first table.

Flipout Tournament with Added Twists

The format is reminiscent of Full Tilt Poker's Flipout tournaments introduced in 2014, except that GG’s version comes with added twists.

Instead of making the flipout round decision-free, every player in Flip & Go is dealt three cards and they must discard one. Players will have 30 seconds to make the decision, and if no selection is made, the system will automatically discard the lowest card dealt.

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Every player can see each other’s hole cards, thus adding a very thin layer of strategy as to which hole card to discard.

Additionally, players can choose their own starting stack at the start of the tournament ranging from one stack to a maximum of ten. Each stack costs one buy-in. The bigger the stack, the higher chance of reaching the money but with added cost.

And lastly, to make the flip stage even more exciting, there is a free side bonus, allowing players the chance to win extra stacks based on their hole cards. For instance, a player will receive 1x their starting stack if they are dealt a three-card straight; 2x for a flush; 3x if they hit three-of-a-kind and 4x if dealt a straight flush.

“If you want to get straight to the hottest action in a tournament, then Flip & Go is for you,” said Daniel Negreanu, GGPoker ambassador.

“Get flipping with a standard stack or super-size your chips from the start; the choice is yours! There are extra stacks on offer during the flipout and a standard game gets underway once you’re in the money.”

Flip & Go’s Scheduled to Run Every Half Hour

Flip & Gos are currently scheduled to run every thirty minutes, though initially it was slated to run every hour. The game is available in four different buy-ins starting at one cent and going up to $25. Each of them is played 8-handed, with the final table featuring 9 players.

Each of the Flip & Go tournaments promises a guarantee, even during quiet periods. In total, $3055 is guaranteed every half hour, or almost $150,000 a day, and they will need between 100 and 500 total entries in order to cover them.

No tournament fee is charged at the lowest buy-in available (one cent) while for the other buy-ins, the operator charges between 5% and 6.7%.

Flip & Go At a Glance:

• Flipout tournament with some skill involved
• Goes straight into the action thus providing a quickfire way to make the money
• Game is played 8-handed and is a Pineapple variant, meaning players are dealt three cards and must discard one before the flop
• Players can choose their own starting stack ranging from 1x the buy-in to 10x
• Side Bonus available giving players extra stacks for stronger hole cards
• Tournament fees range from 5% to 6.7%; rake-free at the lowest buy-in (1 cent)
• Almost $150,000 in prize money guaranteed every day

Flip & Go is the operator’s second innovative product already this year.

Recently, GGPoker launched GGCare, a feature that gives some money back to “unlucky” players. Every day, the operator runs a GGCare flipout freeroll with $30,000 worth of prizes – a similar mechanism used in Flip & Go except that players are all-in on every hand until there is a winner.

The number of chips a player receives is based on how unlucky the player was, a score determined by “a proprietary big-data algorithm.” In short, the more unlucky a player is, the bigger the starting stack he or she will receive.

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Pamela Sambrook, Country House Brewing in England, 1500-1900 from Amazon.com or from Amazon UK

Flip, in those days, was a favourite and fashionable liquor, especially among the New England settlers....Put into a quart of beer a tablespoonful of brown sugar, warm it thoroughly by stirring it round with a red hot poker; add from a gill to half a pint of old Antigua rum; grate on half a nutmeg; our grandfathers thought it a capital beverage.
Charles Miner, History of Wyoming, 1845

Mary Gaston, Antique Brass & Copper from Amazon.com or from Amazon UK

Gregg Smith, Beer in America: The Early Years--1587-1840, from Amazon

The English labourer, according to my experience, prefers to warm his supper ale with a red-hot poker.
Walter Johnson, Folk Memory, 1908

Poker Flip Table

..those good old days when it was thought best to heat the poker red hot before plunging it into the mugs of flip. This heating of the poker has been disapproved of late years, but I do not know on what grounds; if one is to drink bitters and gins and the like....I do not know why one should not make them palatable and heat them with his own poker.
Charles Dudley Warner, Backlog Studies, 1872

Warming beer and mulling ale at the fireside - tin and copper mullers, hot pokers or flip-irons

In this photo* of a 1790s English kitchen are two different brass containers for warming beer. If you want to try spotting them yourself before reading on, look on the wall to the right of the fireplace and on the mantelshelf. Attractive copper antiques now - but once they were used for warming and mulling ale. Why was beer warmed? And how?

In England and other beer-drinking countries warm ale was a popular winter drink when heated on its own or mulled with spice and sugar. Many people also thought ale was healthier drunk warm. And then there was a fondness for sweetened warm ale with nutmeg. If you added a measure of rum or brandy the mixture was called flip, and was popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

...when I did always drink cold beer...I was very often troubled with exceeding pain in the head...also with stomach-ache, tooth-ache, cough, cold, and many other rheumatic diseases.. But since my drinking my beer (small or strong) actually as hot as blood, I have never been troubled with any of the former diseases, but have always continued in very good health constantly...
F.W., A Treatise of Warm Beer, 1641

In England, although mulled ale was popular, and there were recipes for flip in cookery books, it was sometimes seen as slightly disreputable, associated with boisterous sailors from the 17th century on.** 19th century writers also thought it suitable for the lower classes at Christmas. There doesn't seem to have been this feeling amongst settlers in America. Flip is mentioned in the memoirs of respectable New Englanders.

Flip, a sort of Sailor's Drink, made of Ale, Brandy, and Sugar.
Nathan Bailey, An universal etymological English dictionary, 1721

Connecticut, 1820s: The boys heated the flip-irons and passed around the cider and flip, while Aunt Esther and the daughters were as busy in serving the doughnuts, cake, and cheese.
Wm C Beecher and Rev. Samuel Scoville, A Biography of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, 1888

Men drinking in an inn or at home by the hearth didn't necessarily want to wait for someone in the kitchen to warm up ale or flip in a pan. They used a hot poker from the fire. You can see this re-created, complete with hissing sound effects, in A Man for All Seasons when Cromwell sticks a poker into a tall pewter tankard of ale before giving it to a visitor. Slightly more hygienic, and avoiding any burnt taste, were the flip-irons set aside for warming drinks. They may have gone from jug to jug, tankard to tankard, but at least they didn't have ash on. Some had rounded heads, like the iron rods used to heat pots of tar, and were called loggerheads. Flip-dog and hottle are other names you may come across.

In a little inn, in a small village in one of the western counties of England, a group of men were assembled [in] the tap-room, where the fire was blazing very comfortably, and serving the purpose of keeping the poker at that degree of red heat necessary to warm a pot of beer when inserted therein.
James Hannay, King Dobbs, 1849

So was there a better way? In the UK two styles of ale muller or beer warmer developed, probably during the 18th century. Both could be used at the fireside. One was boot-shaped. You could stick the 'toe' into the fire and let the heat spread through the ale inside. (Called boots or slippers, sometimes shoes.) The other style was a simple cone to be stuck point-down into the heat from the top of the fire. Perhaps these would work best on a coal fire, although you could press them into a deep pile of glowing ash from a log fire. They were particularly widespread in 19th century Britain, where coal fires were the norm.

Flop Poker Game

You could buy simple tin mullers as well as lovely shiny copper ones. Sambrook's Country House Brewing in England shows an 1898 catalogue offering two-pint tin cones at 24 shillings a dozen, while the same money would not pay for five copper cone mullers - available in one and one-and-a-half pint sizes too. Her book also shows a boot-shaped muller made of sheet iron.

'Then,' said Mr. Codlin, 'fetch me a pint of warm ale...'
...the landlord retired to draw the beer, and presently returning with it, applied himself to warm the same in a small tin vessel shaped funnel-wise, for the convenience of sticking it far down in the fire and getting at the bright places. This was soon done, and he handed it over to Mr. Codlin with that creamy froth upon the surface which is one of the happy circumstances attendant upon mulled malt.
Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, 1841

Over time the attractive copper ale mullers became something people enjoyed seeing around a fireplace. Along with well-polished warming pans, aka bed warmers, copper kettles, toasting forks etc. a copper ale muller developed an aura of comfortable tradition, evoking a cosy past when the hearth was warm.

This vessel was of copper — an ale-warmer, though the common name for the article was 'the devil'. This 'devil' now only hangs on the walls of inns as a relic of bygone times, because, I am told, not only are hot ales less asked for, but landlords and landladies are averse to the trouble of making such drinks.
Letter from Nottinghamshire, Notes and Queries, 1906

Bierwärmer - German beer warmer - a clean alternative to the poker?

In Germany and Austria some people warm their beer with a Bierwärmer, although they may be seen as old-fashioned. It's a tube that you fill with boiling water before putting it in your mug. It has a hook to hang it over the side, often with a stand to hold it when it's not in the beer. Old ones are tin (see picture); fancier ones were made of opalescent glass, or even silver. Some people used to use a metal rod that was heated in boiling water. There are some vintage mid-20th century electric immersion beer warmers too. Inns used to keep beer warmers for customers' drinks, but this has died out as it contravenes modern hygiene regulations.

[In 1930s Vienna the musician Guido Adler] ...had the waiter bring him a 'beer-warmer' (an iron rod removed from a pot of boiling water and stuck into the beer glass).
Edward R. Reilly, Gustav Mahler and Guido Adler: Records of a Friendship

More than one stainless steel beer warmer of the German 'hot water bottle' type is currently available. Some are promoted as protecting stomachs which can't tolerate cold beer. Are these being bought by people who remember beer warming in 'the old days', or by a new generation of cask ale connoisseurs? Brewers sometimes suggest an ideal temperature for bringing out the flavour of their beer. Is this a good way of bringing beer to a state of perfection?

*Photos of kitchen and copper mullers taken for Heather's Travel Blog
**See Congreve's Love for Love, 1695, for a flip-drinking sailor

07 Feb 2011

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