Algonquin Round Table No Sirree! How did no sirree come about? No Sirree! had its genesis at the studio of Neysa McMein, Who said it first? was a take-off of a then-popular European touring revue called La Chauve-Souris, directed by Nikita Balieff. was it a success? With the success of No Sirree! the Round Tablers hoped to duplicate it with an "official"
did they duplicate it?
Did the Algonquin Round Tablers duplicate No Sirree!?
Given the literary and theatrical activities of the Round Table members, it was perhaps inevitable that they would write and stage their own revue. No Sirree!, staged for one night only in April 1922, was a take-off of a then-popular European touring revue called La Chauve-Souris, directed by Nikita Balieff.  No Sirree! had its genesis at the studio of Neysa McMein, which served as something of a salon for Round Tablers away from the Algonquin. Acts included: "Opening Chorus" featuring Woollcott, Toohey, Kaufman, Connelly, Adams and Benchley with violinist Jascha Heifetz providing offstage, off-key accompaniment; "He Who Gets Flapped", a musical number featuring the song "The Everlastin' Ingenue Blues" written by Dorothy Parker and performed by Robert Sherwood accompanied by "chorus girls" including Tallulah Bankhead, Helen Hayes, Ruth Gillmore, Lenore Ulric and Mary Brandon; "Zowie, or the Curse of an Akins Heart"; "The Greasy Hag, an O'Neill Play in One Act" with Kaufman, Connelly and Woollcott; and "Mr. Whim Passes By--An A. A. Milne Play."  The only item of note to emerge from No Sirree! was Robert Benchley's contribution, The Treasurer's Report. Benchley's disjointed parody so delighted those in attendance that Irving Berlin hired Benchley in 1923 to deliver the Report as part of Berlin's Music Box Revue for $500 a week. In 1928, Report was later made into a short sound film in the Fox Movietone sound-on-film system by Fox Film Corporation. The film marked the beginning of a second career for Benchley in Hollywood.  With the success of No Sirree! the Round Tablers hoped to duplicate it with an "official" Vicious Circle production open to the public with material performed by professional actors. Kaufman and Connelly funded the revue, named The Forty-niners. The revue opened in November 1922 and was a failure, running for just 15 performances. CANNOTANSWER
The revue opened in November 1922 and was a failure,
The Algonquin Round Table was a group of New York City writers, critics, actors, and wits. Gathering initially as part of a practical joke, members of "The Vicious Circle", as they dubbed themselves, met for lunch each day at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 until roughly 1929. At these luncheons they engaged in wisecracks, wordplay, and witticisms that, through the newspaper columns of Round Table members, were disseminated across the country.

Daily association with each other, both at the luncheons and outside of them, inspired members of the Circle to collaborate creatively. The entire group worked together successfully only once, however, to create a revue called No Sirree! which helped launch a Hollywood career for Round Tabler Robert Benchley.

In its ten years of association, the Round Table and a number of its members acquired national reputations, both for their contributions to literature and for their sparkling wit. Although some of their contemporaries, and later in life even some of its members, disparaged the group, its reputation has endured long after its dissolution.

Origin
The group that would become the Round Table began meeting in June 1919 as the result of a practical joke carried out by theatrical press agent John Peter Toohey. Toohey, annoyed at The New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott for refusing to plug one of Toohey's clients (Eugene O'Neill) in his column, organized a luncheon supposedly to welcome Woollcott back from World War I, where he had been a correspondent for Stars and Stripes. Instead, Toohey used the occasion to poke fun at Woollcott on a number of fronts. Woollcott's enjoyment of the joke and the success of the event prompted Toohey to suggest that the group in attendance meet at the Algonquin each day for lunch.

The group first gathered in the Algonquin's Pergola Room (later called the Oak Room) at a long rectangular table. As they increased in number, Algonquin manager Frank Case moved them to the Rose Room and a round table. Initially the group called itself "The Board" and the luncheons "Board meetings". After being assigned a waiter named Luigi, the group re-christened itself "Luigi Board". Finally, they became "The Vicious Circle" although "The Round Table" gained wide currency after a caricature by cartoonist Edmund Duffy of the Brooklyn Eagle portrayed the group sitting at a round table and wearing armor.

Membership

Charter members of the Round Table included:

 Franklin Pierce Adams, columnist
 Robert Benchley, humorist and actor
 Heywood Broun, columnist and sportswriter (married to Ruth Hale)
 Marc Connelly, playwright
 Ruth Hale, freelance writer who worked for women's rights
 George S. Kaufman, playwright and director
 Dorothy Parker, critic, poet, short-story writer, and screenwriter
 Brock Pemberton, Broadway producer
 Murdock Pemberton, Broadway publicist, writer
 Harold Ross, The New Yorker editor
 Robert E. Sherwood, author and playwright
 John Peter Toohey, Broadway publicist

 Alexander Woollcott, critic and journalist

Membership was not official or fixed for so many others who moved in and out of the Circle. Some of these included:

 Tallulah Bankhead, actress
 Norman Bel Geddes, stage and industrial designer
 Noël Coward, playwright
 Blyth Daly, actress
 Edna Ferber, author and playwright
 Eva Le Gallienne, actress
 Margalo Gillmore, actress
 Jane Grant, journalist and feminist (married to Harold Ross)
 Beatrice Kaufman, editor and playwright (married to George S. Kaufman)
 Margaret Leech, writer and historian
 Herman J. Mankiewicz, screenwriter 
 Harpo Marx, comedian and film star
 Neysa McMein, magazine illustrator
 Alice Duer Miller, writer
 Donald Ogden Stewart, playwright and screenwriter
 Frank Sullivan, journalist and humorist
 Deems Taylor, composer
 Estelle Winwood, actress and comedian
 Peggy Wood, actress

Activities
In addition to the daily luncheons, members of the Round Table worked and associated with each other almost constantly. The group was devoted to games, including cribbage and poker. The group had its own poker club, the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club, which met at the hotel on Saturday nights. Regulars at the game included Kaufman, Adams, Broun, Ross and Woollcott, with non-Round Tablers Herbert Bayard Swope, silk merchant Paul Hyde Bonner, baking heir Raoul Fleischmann, actor Harpo Marx, and writer Ring Lardner sometimes sitting in. The group also played charades (which they called simply "The Game") and the "I can give you a sentence" game, which spawned Dorothy Parker's memorable sentence using the word horticulture: "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think."

Members often visited Neshobe Island, a private island co-owned by several "Algonks"—but governed by Woollcott as a "benevolent tyrant", as his biographer Samuel Hopkins Adams charitably put it—located on several acres in the middle of Lake Bomoseen in Vermont. There they would engage in their usual array of games including Wink murder, which they called simply "Murder", plus croquet.

A number of Round Tablers were inveterate practical jokers, constantly pulling pranks on one another. As time went on the jokes became ever more elaborate. Harold Ross and Jane Grant once spent weeks playing a particularly memorable joke on Woollcott involving a prized portrait of himself. They had several copies made, each slightly more askew than the last, and would periodically secretly swap them out and then later comment to Woollcott "What on earth is wrong with your portrait?" until Woollcott was beside himself. Eventually they returned the original portrait.

No Sirree!
Given the literary and theatrical activities of the Round Table members, it was perhaps inevitable that they would write and stage their own revue. No Sirree!, staged for one night only in April 1922, was a take-off of a then-popular European touring revue called La Chauve-Souris, directed by Nikita Balieff.

No Sirree! had its genesis at the studio of Neysa McMein, which served as something of a salon for Round Tablers away from the Algonquin. Acts included: "Opening Chorus" featuring Woollcott, Toohey, Kaufman, Connelly, Adams and Benchley with violinist Jascha Heifetz providing offstage, off-key accompaniment; "He Who Gets Flapped", a musical number featuring the song "The Everlastin' Ingenue Blues" written by Dorothy Parker and performed by Robert Sherwood accompanied by "chorus girls" including Tallulah Bankhead, Helen Hayes, Ruth Gillmore, Lenore Ulric and Mary Brandon; "Zowie, or the Curse of an Akins Heart"; "The Greasy Hag, an O'Neill Play in One Act" with Kaufman, Connelly and Woollcott; and "Mr. Whim Passes By—An A. A. Milne Play."

The only item of note to emerge from No Sirree! was Robert Benchley's contribution, The Treasurer's Report. Benchley's disjointed parody so delighted those in attendance that Irving Berlin hired Benchley in 1923 to deliver the Report as part of Berlin's Music Box Revue for $500 a week. In 1928, Report was later made into a short sound film in the Fox Movietone sound-on-film system by Fox Film Corporation. The film marked the beginning of a second career for Benchley in Hollywood.

With the success of No Sirree! the Round Tablers hoped to duplicate it with an "official" Vicious Circle production open to the public with material performed by professional actors. Kaufman and Connelly funded the revue, named The Forty-niners. The revue opened in November 1922 and was a failure, running for just 15 performances.

Decline
As members of the Round Table moved into ventures outside New York City, inevitably the group drifted apart. By the early 1930s the Vicious Circle was broken. Edna Ferber said she realized it when she arrived at the Rose Room for lunch one day in 1932 and found the group's table occupied by a family from Kansas. Frank Case was asked what happened to the group. He shrugged and replied, "What became of the reservoir at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street? These things do not last forever." Some members of the group remained friends after its dissolution. Parker and Benchley in particular remained close up until his death in 1945, although her political leanings did strain their relationship. Others, as the group itself would come to understand when it gathered following Woollcott's death in 1943, simply realized that they had nothing to say to one another.

Public response and legacy
Because a number of the members of the Round Table had regular newspaper columns, the activities and quips of various Round Table members were reported in the national press. This brought Round Tablers widely into the public consciousness as renowned wits.

Not all of their contemporaries were fans of the group. Their critics accused them of logrolling, or exchanging favorable plugs of one another's works, and of rehearsing their witticisms in advance. James Thurber (who lived in the hotel) was a detractor of the group, accusing them of being too consumed by their elaborate practical jokes. H. L. Mencken, who was much admired by many in the Circle, was also a critic, commenting to fellow writer Anita Loos that "their ideals were those of a vaudeville actor, one who is extremely 'in the know' and inordinately trashy".

The group showed up in the 1923 best-seller Black Oxen by Gertrude Atherton. She sarcastically described a group she called "the Sophisticates":

Groucho Marx, brother of Round Table associate Harpo, was never comfortable amidst the viciousness of the Vicious Circle. Therein he remarked "The price of admission is a serpent's tongue and a half-concealed stiletto." Even some members of the Round Table disparaged it later in life. Dorothy Parker in particular criticized the group.

Despite Parker's bleak assessment and while it is true that some members of the Round Table are perhaps now "famous for being famous" instead of for their literary output, Round Table members and associates contributed to the literary landscape, including Pulitzer Prize-winning work by Circle members Kaufman, Connelly and Sherwood (who won four) and by associate Ferber and the legacy of Ross's New Yorker. Others made lasting contributions to the realms of stage and screen — Tallulah Bankhead and Eva Le Gallienne became Broadway greats and the films of Harpo and Benchley remain popular; and Parker has remained renowned for her short stories and literary reviews.

The Algonquin Round Table, as well as the number of other literary and theatrical greats who lodged there, helped earn the Algonquin Hotel its status as a New York City Historic Landmark. The hotel was so designated in 1987. In 1996 the hotel was designated a national literary landmark by the Friends of Libraries USA based on the contributions of "The Round Table Wits". The organization's bronze plaque is attached to the front of the hotel.
Although the Rose Room was removed from the Algonquin in a 1998 remodel, the hotel paid tribute to the group by commissioning and hanging the painting A Vicious Circle by Natalie Ascencios, depicting the Round Table and also created a replica of the original table. The hotel occasionally stages an original musical production, The Talk of the Town, in the Oak Room. Its latest production started September 11, 2007 and ran through the end of the year.

A film about the members, The Ten-Year Lunch (1987), won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
The dramatic film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) recounts the Round Table from the perspective of Dorothy Parker.

In popular culture
Portions of the 1981 film Rich and Famous were set in the Algonquin and one of the film's characters, Liz Hamilton (played by Jacqueline Bisset), refers to the Round Table during the film.

The Algonquin Round Table was featured in "The Young Indiana Jones and the Scandal of 1920", a 1993 episode of the TV series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, in which the title character meets the group and attends at least two lunches. Wonderful Nonsense - The Algonquin Round Table is a documentary produced for the DVD release of that film in 2008.

In season 2, episode 4 of Seinfeld entitled “The Phone Message” (1991), Jerry tells Donna, the woman he is seeing at the time: "Boy, I bet you got a regular Algonquin round table there", after Donna says she discussed a Dockers commercial with friends.

The 1994 film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle concerns Dorothy Parker and her relationship with Robert Benchley and the larger group.

In 2009, Robert Benchley's grandson, Nat Benchley, and co-editor Kevin C. Fitzpatrick published The Lost Algonquin Round Table, a collection of the early writings of the group. Benchley's grandson Peter Benchley wrote the famous shark novel Jaws upon which the Steven Spielberg film is based.

See also

References

External links 
 Algonquin Round Table historical site History notes and news since 1999
 Algonquin Round Table at PBS's American Masters
 

American literary movements
American humorists
Culture of Manhattan
Literary circles
20th-century American literature
Duplicate poker is a variant of the card game poker. Duplicate poker is based on the principles of duplicate bridge, but it also incorporates some of the rules of pot limit and no limit Texas hold'em.

While the game is more conducive to an automated online format because of pre-set decks and the scoring mechanic, duplicate poker has also been played in a live format.  The first duplicate poker tournament was held in April 2007 at the Cherokee Casino in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Duplicatepoker.com, the first poker room to use the format, closed down on October 5, 2008, citing the global financial crisis as the reason for the removal of services.

Duplicate poker versus standard poker
Duplicate poker is a game in which there are two or more tables, each consisting of the same number of players.  Each table uses hands dealt from an identically sequenced deck of cards.  Each player holds the same hand as the person seated in identical seats at the other tables. Duplicate Poker was first devised by Californians Bruce Altshuler and Danny Kleinman who memorialized their concept in a lengthy article in Card Player Magazine in August of 1993. The article indicated that for Duplicate Poker to work in a multi-table format, each table had to have the same number of seats with no sit outs on any hand which could distort the final results. The winner would be the player who either won the most chips on a set number of hands and who lost the least amount of chips if the seat had a negative expectation. In theory, a player could win a duplicate poker tournament without winning many hands by avoiding big losses on hands that those holding the same cards at other tables play more recklessly. Under the original concept, Duplicate Poker was envisioned as a Limit game. A no limit or pot limit stake could only work at Duplicate Poker if the chips are re-set after every hand. A set number of hands are played in each round. In a multi-table tournament, the players can be assigned to different tables sitting at different seats after each round. Under Altshuler's and Kleinman's concept, a duplicate hold em team game could be held with a team of 4-9 members of each team each sitting at a different seat at a different table, and the team which ends up with the most chips would win.

Duplicate poker can be played in Hold Em or Omaha where the final hands are fixed, but not in Stud, where a fold alters the order of the cards.

The principal difference from playing standard poker is duplicate poker's measure of results, which are between players sitting at corresponding seats at other tables.  Player performance is measured relatively to other players sitting in their parallel seat. The object of duplicate poker is to win more chips than your opponents sitting in corresponding seats at other tables. The winner is the player who has accumulated the best total difference in chips vs. the players in the same seat at the other tables.  Conceivably, even a player who loses chips overall can win at the game if that player loses fewer chips than his opponents.

Under the format originally devised by Altshuler and Kleinman in their Card Player article, the team game would consist of up to 8 members, each team player sitting at a different seat at each of the tables. The number of tables would correspond to the number of players on each of the teams. Determining the result of the duplicate team is simple. The team with the most chips at the end of the event is the winner. Again, a limit stake format was envisioned for the team concept.

SkillBet poker
SkillBet.com launched in July 2012. In this version, two players, sitting at two identical tables, are dealt the same poker hand. They both play against the same five computer opponents. If one player wins $10 with a particular hand, but his opponent wins $15 with the same hand in the same situation, then he’s been outplayed to the tune of $5 for that hand and owes his opponent $5.

Duplicate Poker Nation's Cup
In 2011, the International Federation of Poker (IFP) announced the "Duplicate Poker Nation's Cup." From around the world, 72 players made up 12 national teams played within the isolation of the London Eye pods, ensuring that no information could be shared between tables. Those national teams were USA, UK, France, Spain, Germany, Brazil, Denmark, Japan, Ireland, Holland, Australia, plus a team from Zynga.

Recognition as a sport - 'Match Poker' 
In April 2010, IFP secured provisional membership of the International Mind Sports Association (IMSA) at IMSA's annual congress in Dubai.

In the years following the 2011 Duplicate Poker Nation's Cup, the IFP renamed their version of duplicate poker to 'Match Poker'. Their goal then became to "promote poker and its Match Poker™ variation as a skill game and a mind sport". Essentially the same game, the IFP describes Match Poker as "a team sport incorporating regular Texas Hold’em. Albeit typically with a pot-limit pre-flop and no-limit post-flop structure." This team game was conceptually similar to that which was described by Altshuler and Kleinman in their 1993 article in Card Player Magazine.

On October 2, 2017, Match Poker gained recognition as a sport. It now holds Observer Status with the Global Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF). In response to this, the IFP changed its name to the IFMP, to recognise that they are now proponents of the specific version of duplicate poker they call Match Poker.

International Match Poker championships have been run by the IFMP since 2011, with the sport gaining popularity most notably in India via the Match Indian Poker League, launched jointly by the IFMP and Viann Industries Ltd (Raj Kundra's company).

Under the authority of the IFMP, a team in Australia is now developing a mobile application called MATCHPOKER Online. The app will allow people to play duplicate poker (in the form of Match Poker) against players around the world on their personal devices. The app is expected to launch in beta phase in late 2020.

AI Poker 
Duplicate poker has been used when testing the artificial intellegence poker programs Polaris (poker bot), Claudico and Libratus. These programs play heads-up Texas Hold'em. Each hand was played twice, with the AI getting each set of cards once, against a different human opponent.

References

External links
How to play Duplicate Poker Official Video from IFP

Poker variants Duplicate Scrabble is a variant of the board game Scrabble where all the players are faced with the same board and letters at the same time and must play the highest scoring word they can find. Although duplicate is rarely played at competition level in English, it is the most popular form of the game in French and is also played in other languages, such as Romanian and Dutch. The largest French Scrabble festivals can attract over 2000 people and some individual tournaments can count over 1000 participants per game. Although not popular for competitions in English, the computer game Scrabble 2005 contains a duplicate version allowing up to 16 players to play on the same board at once. It was also used on the UK TV game show TV Scrabble as one of the rounds.

History
Duplicate Scrabble was invented by Hippolyte Wouters circa 1970, a Belgian lawyer who spoke French as his first language. In 1972 he organised and participated the first French World Scrabble Championships in Cannes, France. Although only 8 players participated in this tournament, a World Championship has been organised every year since 1972 in a different city in several different countries, most recently in Tours, France, where 274 people participated.

Due to the nature of duplicate, there is almost no limit to the number of players who can participate in a single game, and at the biggest international festivals, some games are played by more than 1000 people simultaneously. In French, duplicate is practised in France, Belgium, Canada, Switzerland, Senegal, Benin, Tunisia, Lebanon and many other countries.

Duplicate Scrabble has been part of the Romanian national championship since 1981.

Rules

The rules of duplicate Scrabble can vary between different languages and different associations. Some of the general principles of duplicate are

 The arbiter draws seven random tiles at the start of the game. He announces them to the players who draw the same seven letters. The players are given an allotted time to write their chosen word on a slip of paper which will be collected by a runner and handed to an arbiter. The player is obligated to record the score and the position of his word, and the highest scoring word is placed on the board. Hence every player is faced with the same situation at the same time, and no player has any advantage because of the letters selections.
 An invalid word scores zero points.
 There must always be at least one vowel and one consonant. If the seven letters do not contain one vowel and one consonant, they are put back in the bag and seven new letters are chosen. If there are no more consonants or no more vowels in the bag, the game ends.
 At the end of the game, the player who has scored the most points is declared the winner. This score can also be expressed as a percentage (by dividing by the total of all the best plays) or as a negative, for example 790 out of 800 would be -10 (or 98.75%).

Variations
 Thinking time  To make the game more difficult, the thinking time can be reduced. The standard thinking time in French is 3 minutes. Similar to chess, blitz games are played where the player only has 1 minute to make his moves. "Semi-rapid" games are also played with two minutes to make a move.
 Number of players  Duplicate Scrabble can be played in pairs where the two players agree on which solution they will submit. The French World Scrabble Championship by pairs has been played every year since 1975. A duplicate pairs competition is also part of the Romanian national championship.

See also
Duplicate bridge
Scrabble variants

References

Board games introduced in 1970
Scrabble variants