Not necessarily as there is no equivalent for the ally or the stab in Poker.

Really, I'm interested in what f2f serious diplomacy looks like. My only experience with it is with family. We usually talk a bit pre-game, put in our first moves, and then the alliances are pretty much set. We all sit at the same table and every so often a "hey england, let's talk in the other room" comes up. It's obvious they're plotting something, so the rest of us bank on that information.

I have imagined some type of room in which everyone casually walks around, talking to all nations. Is it anything like that? Can anyone paint a picture for me?

Actually, there is a form of stab in poker. It's called pot bullying, slow-playing, or bluffing depending on how you pull it off.

F2F needs multiple rooms or spaces and the abiding image I carry is of players trying desperately to talk to someone who is already holed up in another space. The time limit factor puts you all under such pressure that it is amusing to see the panic that can set in.

"We must talk, we have to talk", is the usual cry.

The last time I played a F2F game was awesome. We had a full 7, 3 of which were me and my 3 roommates. There were people running off for discussions in the bedrooms, the 2 living rooms, the bathroom, the garage, the yard (front, back, and sides). Everyone's phones were going off constantly from texts while they were in meetings with other people. Everyone was trying to spy on everyone else AND have their own secret meetings. All of which is at a truly frantic pace because you only have 15 minutes to talk, run off to somewhere safe, send texts, spy, run off to talk to your other neighbor, try to sneak away unnoticed with your secret friend... LoL.. freaking awesome.

Err... me and my 2 roommates.

Wow, roommate deflation.

ive played F2F a ton of times. we set up the board in a 'public' room in my basement, and everyone that wants to have a meeting will go into any other room of the house. nobody gets suspicious if you talk to a certain someone, because everyone else knows your either coordinating attacks or convincing someone you wont attack them, so the person your talking to could just as easily be an enemy as a friend.

and ive wondered about the whole spying or eavesdropping thing. in the rules, it says its ok, but im pretty sure it would piss some people off.

F2F poker is definitely better.
I find F2F diplomacy too much of a rush. Especially with Flashman's five-minute phases.

But body language can tell you so much... I really enjoy F2F Dip (and poker, of course).

5 minutes rocks!

Speed of thought and decisiveness, that's what it is all about. Besides, we only do 5 minutes when the number of units being played/ordered is small. We increase the time as players amass an empire - though not by too much.

I've played F2F a few times back in college, with 24 hour deadlines. We met every evening after dinner to turn in moves and adjudicate the board. You 'read' a lot into body language, avoidance, intonations, ect,... but there was plenty of time to arrange your conversations. I think the best part was sitting around the board, and seeing the surprise/dismay/angst among the players at the results. (do I sound a little sadistic here??)

In world class tournament play, the lowest time limit is 10 minutes for turns and 2 minutes for order writing in separate phases, although in about 1/2 the World DipCon Championships, Drop Dead Deadlines are used which means that there is a continuous clock with between 14-18 minutes on it and ALL negotiations/order writing and adjudications are done as the clock moves. So if you spend a lot of time on the adjudication then you have less time for the rest of the turn. This makes the game length in time exactly predictable when setting a year limit such as 1907 (popular in France) or 1911 etc, though the US/North Americans tend to have most rounds run without a final time limit.
In the San Francisco Bay area we tend to have faster games with limits of 10 minutes for orders and 2 for writing. Going to 5 minutes has been done for newbie games on the theory that new players have no idea what to talk about for 5 minutes and for those players a shorter game is needed to get them hooked on the system.

How long do these F2F games usually take to complete? It seems like a long night with an awful lot of activity. I just finished a F2F game, but we only did moves every other day. That took about three weeks...

5 minute phases? That's insanity!! When we play F2F, it's usually 15, with a struggle to get people to abide by it.

In the San Francisco Bay Area the average social game ends between 4 and half and 5 and a half hours. The average game in our major FtF tournament event *Whipping- held in April each year* is almost an hour longer.
The key is that even in social games we play with a timer on and that helps push the game along.

The last FtF game I held at my house ran for 6 hours. We tried to stick to an 18 minute Winter/Spring, and a 16 minute Fall. It would have gone more smoothly with a legitimate timer chanting out the deadlines in a charming commonwealth accent rather than some clunky bit of javascript.

I don't think I've ever finished a F2F game to completion... it's always to the point where people sort of dally off, maybe with a promise to continue playing later, or with a sort of acceptance that the person in the lead has won the game.

It's always so frantic. =D

Body language is frighteningly useful. I suspect seasoned poker players would have a nice advantage in the F2F Diplomacy arena... many players stumble over their words, hesitate, or just plain get stumped if you ask them a lot of questions that they have to think up lies for.

Experienced Poker players do not talk much in a game except through formalised bids. I like the game but do not think that the specific skills employed will be enough to overcome the need to communicate effectively and quickly as in Dip.

Reading the body language (ticks and tells) is about all the advantage they'd get, but that would be countered by the disadvatage of NOT usually talking about the game. Some can be very talkative, but they don't discuss the current lay of the table unless it's headsup, one is all in, and the other is reviewing the hand in their head.