Talk:Hand-in-cap

A game?
Surely this was a means of settling disputes in trading and ensuring fair deals, rather than a game. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nasty swimmer (talk • contribs) 08:48, 3 December 2013 (UTC)


 * 1873, John Camden Hotten, The Slang Dictionary suggests otherwise: it seems to have been played as a sort of drunken game. 2A00:23C5:FE18:2701:6053:233F:32B3:5830 (talk) 00:40, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

Something has been left out
When I typed this, this article contained the text "Both players and the umpire then put some forfeit money in a cap". This is really vague. What is the amount of money they put into the cap? Do they all put the same amount of money in? If not, how much does each person (both players and umpire) put in? Please be more specific. Also, there's not much of what I would call Morganstern/von Neumann Game Theory analysis of the progress of the game, an analysis of what incentives the players and the umpire have. I assume that somehow the nature of the game motivates any player to make the trade if that player's best-effort evaluation of the difference in values of the items is balanced (or more-than-balanced) by the umpire's evaluation, and that the umpire is motivated against skewing the valuation unfairly towards either player. But this is not explained. And yes, I agree with the assessment aove from 3 Dec 2013 that this is not a game so much as an effort to enable a trade of items that are obviously of different values, where each player wants to make the trade (because each player has a need for the item that they do not currently possess, the gratification of which need will, with some money thrown in, outweigh whatever need they have for the item that they already possess), but one player will be unwilling to make a trade so obviously favorable to the other unless money is thrown into the deal. If the two players can't agree on that amount of money, maybe this game is their way of enlisting a third person to devise an "objectively" justified amount of money.2600:1700:6759:B000:E894:BFCC:705D:880 (talk) 11:48, 16 June 2024 (UTC)Christopher Lawrence Simpson