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500K bet on rock paper scissors ruled invalid by Quebec court

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Re: 500K bet on rock paper scissors ruled invalid by Quebec court

#181
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oof. The game itself just doesn't lend itself to fair competitive play owing to its very nature. It's like how the overhead press was removed as a powerlifting lift in competition: It's just not possible to judge fairly (too easy to cheat using your legs).

This I don’t agree with: they should have left it as leg-assisted overhead press. So what that you helped with your back and legs? It’s a full-body activity anyway.

There already is a "leg-assisted overhead press" widely seen in competition -- the jerk. Except you see it in Olympic lifting, not powerlifting, and it's generally not done on its own, but as part of the clean and jerk. The snatch is another form of leg-assisted overhead press.

So if that's what you're into ... take up Olympic lifting!

Re: 500K bet on rock paper scissors ruled invalid by Quebec court

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all gambling involves a strong element of skill. Horse racing, poker, blackjack, even casino games like slots have an element of skill.

While I agree that many casino games have skill involved, I'm pretty sure slots literally has no skill involved outside of learning if there is a issue with the random number generator.

Skill doesn’t mean it makes the game profitable, it means the game rewards intelligent choices with improved returns.

Different slot machines have different payout percentages, simply selecting the best improves your returns. The Stratosphere used to have 101% payout machines that could only be reached by walking all the way to the very end of their dreary mall.

There are also progressive slots, different comp rates and negotiable loss rebates for high rollers.

Re: 500K bet on rock paper scissors ruled invalid by Quebec court

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Over a statistically large sample of hands or games, skilled players will almost always dominate unskilled players. That's true of any game or sport, though. Poker is just one in which that is "less true".

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of this. While it's true that the more skilled party in a traditional physical sport will do better over the long run, their advantage will also be more apparent over the short run. Skill in poker comes from managing variance over a long horizon; the advantage for a particular hand is largely determined by randomness The advantage in sports does not derive from randomne…

> Over a statistically large sample of hands or games, skilled players will almost always dominate unskilled players.

> It would be almost impossible to quantify odds of winning a given poker hand before any cards are dealt.

Not directly relevant, but it just occured to me that, if you're playing poker against someone you know is more skilled than you, the best strategy is to not look at your cards.

Re: 500K bet on rock paper scissors ruled invalid by Quebec court

#184
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And this is why gambling should be banned How do you propose to enforce this? If these two people had simply gambled the same way, and the loser took out the mortgage and paid the winner, nobody would even know. It's illegal to gamble where I live, yet every year my friends and I place bets on major sporting events. The solution to problems isn't always more government. Particularly when the proposed laws are total…

> How do you propose to enforce this? Don't legally recognize gambling debts. If people lose a bet they can pay it if they want to, but the law wouldn't recognize or enforce the debt. This appears to be basically what happened in this case anyway.

To be fair, what you actually accomplish there is not to ban gambling, but just to limit it to table stakes. Though that's probably a more useful goal anyway.

Re: 500K bet on rock paper scissors ruled invalid by Quebec court

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Law and the government are there to do what benefits the society that grants them their power . Blindly upholding contracts does not benefit the society that grants them their power. ("But look at all these other things they do that suck!" - yup, I'm there with you, but the purpose of government is to be just , which is not the same thing as clueless .)

> Law and the government are there to do what benefits the society that grants them their power. Blindly upholding contracts does not benefit the society that grants them their power. That is but one (very left) interpretation. Good luck getting everyone to agree.

It's "very left" to an Austrian.

To pretty much everyone else it's uncontroversial.

Re: 500K bet on rock paper scissors ruled invalid by Quebec court

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bridge is unfortunately rife with cheating at the highest levels. It's simply too easy to communicate information with your partner that you're not allowed to through subtle signals, and this is very hard to police except at the macro level using a statistical analysis of many games to determine if it seems like players are acting on more information than they should have. The only way to play Bridge without cheating…

I guess bridge is a game where having a poker face is a disadvantage.

No, you want the poker face; you don't want your opponents to be able to discern anything, and if it seems to a judge that you might be communicating information based on your reactions to certain plays then you could be disqualifed.

So you need the poker face, and you need a surreptitious system to exchange information out of band.

Re: 500K bet on rock paper scissors ruled invalid by Quebec court

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Over a statistically large sample of hands or games, skilled players will almost always dominate unskilled players. That's true of any game or sport, though. Poker is just one in which that is "less true".

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of this. While it's true that the more skilled party in a traditional physical sport will do better over the long run, their advantage will also be more apparent over the short run. Skill in poker comes from managing variance over a long horizon; the advantage for a particular hand is largely determined by randomness The advantage in sports does not derive from randomne…

> It would be almost impossible to quantify odds of winning a given poker hand before any cards are dealt.

You're literally making my point, now, namely: luck is a much bigger factor in poker than in other card games, so I prefer to play those that require less fortune from me and more strategy.

Re: 500K bet on rock paper scissors ruled invalid by Quebec court

#188
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're factually wrong. Judges very much, all the time, deem whether a contract is exploitative or not. Valid contracts are signed between two parties where both are very much aware of what they're doing and fall within non-exploitative bounds. You're not allowed to contract yourself into slavery no matter how much you want to. Indentured servitude is similarly illegal. You also can't charge someone a billion percent…

I’m not sure you’re right about libertarians. I haven’t sensed widespread libertarian support for long term debt collection by the government to recover money for foolish lenders.

Do you have a link to anything like that?

Because the libertarian ethos ought to support debt collection 100%. I'd be shocked to see any libertarian state any position contrary to that. Libertarianism is essentially entirely about the role of government being to enforce contracts and natural rights.

Re: 500K bet on rock paper scissors ruled invalid by Quebec court

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree. Better games make affordances for players of differing skill level (like Go for example), but in games where this is not possible, the ethical calculation is more complex (although I would argue the ethical calculation isn't really relevant in a game, as the whole point of most games is about creating a safe place for the mutual exploration of systems). Whether or not the specific examples constitutes…

> as the whole point of most games is about creating a safe place for the mutual exploration of systems What? Can you imagine saying to any reasonable person, “do you want to create a safe place for the mutual exploration of systems?” And having them reply, “oh yeah, I would like to play a game.”

I've given this a little more thought after reading your comment. And I was wrong. The point of games is drama.

Drama in music comes from an anticipated causality from A->B and either the fulfillment or denial of that causality. Romantic-era music strives for maximum drama by injecting as many fulfillment/denial moments as possible, with denials that are stretched to the limit of the implicit rules of the cultural context / musical system.

Minimalist music does something entirely different, by first breaking the expectation of resolution, and then becoming the flame that we stare into; it begins within a known system and then subverts it through stasis.

Can you imagine saying to any reasonable person, "do you want to skip all the boring parts and get to the final note?" Or, "yeah, ok, I don't want to see or even know what happens in the movie, just tell me what the final shot is."

In games, the drama of the "game part" is in exploring the edges of a system, with the added engagement of partial agency towards "resolution" (in a musical sense).

I still can't imagine any reasonable person thinking the "point" of a game is to win. Winning is the objective, not the point. Whether or not employing agency from outside the system is appropriate for a game is up for negotiation among the players, but without some level of adherence to an agreed system, it ceases to be a multiplayer game and becomes a game of solitaire where the rules are whatever the cheater decides.

I can appreciate that there is drama in that, and perhaps the drama of avoiding being caught is more satisfying than the drama of performing "the perfect game" for some people. In that situation, though, I think I'd still describe games as "a safe place for the mutual exploration of systems."

Re: 500K bet on rock paper scissors ruled invalid by Quebec court

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as the whole point of most games is about creating a safe place for the mutual exploration of systems What? Can you imagine saying to any reasonable person, “do you want to create a safe place for the mutual exploration of systems?” And having them reply, “oh yeah, I would like to play a game.”

I've given this a little more thought after reading your comment. And I was wrong. The point of games is drama. Drama in music comes from an anticipated causality from A->B and either the fulfillment or denial of that causality. Romantic-era music strives for maximum drama by injecting as many fulfillment/denial moments as possible, with denials that are stretched to the limit of the implicit rules of the cultural co…

> I still can't imagine any reasonable person thinking the "point" of a game is to win. Winning is the objective, not the point.

After skimming your comment, I’ve decided you’re intentionally splitting hairs to create a difference between point and objective.

Ask yourself: What is the point of going to the grocery store? What is the objective of going to the grocery store?

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