Bud Spencer: Wild West Poker

A pair of aces, a pair of 8s, and an unconfirmed kicker - not a particularly interesting hand in five-card stud to draw by itself, but this hand comes with a title that should be familiar to most of you: The Dead Man’s Hand.

Famous for apparently being the poker hand held by Wild Bill Hickok when he was murdered at the poker table in Deadwood (the real place, not the TV show), the legend ably demonstrates how volatile and dangerous playing poker in the wild west was.

Bud Spencer’s Wild West Poker is also an incredibly dangerous game. Not because it captures the mood of its setting (it doesn’t), but because it’s so bad it may cause you to go all ‘Wild Bill’ on your mobile.

The first sign of trouble is that there are literally no other opponents to play against other than the jolly, bearded Bud. No limits Texas hold ‘em poker isn’t the most exciting two-player card game in the world as there’s really nothing to stop you going all-in on the first hand and winning by luck, so the lack of other opponents is mystifying.

This lack of other players is exacerbated by how badly Bud plays the game. He often goes all-in after a bad flop or folding against an obvious bluff, and it’s like he’s still learning the names of the hands rather than a quick-drawing wild west poker player.

The good news for Bud, though, is that the controls are incredibly ‘sticky’, meaning that you’ll often find yourself calling a raise or the blind without knowing it. This is due to the ‘5’ key cleverly being used for both dealing out the next hand and calling the next hand, with no pause in-between to let you remove your thumb.

Another feasture that helps Bud stay competitive in some games is a fantastic bug in which a split pot can be multiplied ad infinitum by pressing ‘5’ at the wrong time during the animation. Strangely, on one of the occasions this happened to me Bud came out with over $30,000 in chips despite going all-in with around $200.

In the name of fairness I decided to check the game out on a Nokia N81. I didn’t encounter either the split pot bug or the sticky keys as with the Sony Ericsson version, bar the occasional accidental call when starting a new game.

Nevertheless, the fact that Bud Spencer’s Wild West Poker manages to capture approximately none of the tension of a live-or-die poker match from the 19th century is fairly understandable. Its lack of content and inability to count chips or play the game of poker, however, is inexcusable.