Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How poker and a spaceship imposter game make you better at life

altdeep.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 98 posts

Re: How poker and a spaceship imposter game make you better at life

#21

Post by randlet »

mckee1 wrote: post #3

There are many, many life lessons I have drawn from my youth spent playing poker semi-professionally. Perhaps the most consistently useful one was that, as mentioned in the article, one's performance should not be assessed purely on the outcome. In poker, you can play perfectly and still lose. That is true in almost every field of life. Or, to give it more nuance, you can play exceptionally well and only win a little…

"In poker, you can play perfectly and still lose."

Only true over the short term: all you have to do is play GTO poker over an infinite number of hands in a rake free game and you should at least break even I think!

That said, this fact is the main reason that the game of poker really "works". If playing perfectly (or at least at a much higher level than your opponents) allowed you to always best your opponents, then you'd quickly find yourself out of opponents. There needs to be enough luck involved to keep losing players coming back to the table (the same reason most casino games have a thin house edge).

Poker can be an absolutely soul crushing game to play professionally. "Running bad" where you lose money over 10's or 100's of thousands of hands even while playing well can make you seriously question your sanity. It can also cause you to add subtle (or not so subtle) errors into your game (e.g. playing too cautiously or aggressively) which can turn your once winning game into a losing game, making it tough to decide whether you are currently a winning player running bad, or actually a losing player.

Re: How poker and a spaceship imposter game make you better at life

#22

Post by shadowgovt »

aequitas wrote: post #15
andrewzah wrote: post #8

I'm not really sure why they chose Among Us as an alternative to poker. Sure, it has a little chance and unknown information, but among us is really more of a social study to see how easily people can be swayed into voting people off. In my experience if I talk confidently and get the first word in it's pretty easy to cast aside suspicion. In fact, one meta strategy is to kill someone, then report the body yourself a…

There are several 'visual' tasks (medical scan, taking out trash, shields, shooting astroids) that allow's one to prove they are a ligitimate crewmember. Casting doubt on you as a 'self reporter'. Also things like the security camara's add even more dimensions to the game.

A high-risk, high-reward play I've seen is to kill someone, report the body, and claim you were on security camera and saw someone else do it. You can be caught out if it doesn't make sense for you to have been watching the cams, but while people keep a mental inventory of "who I saw doing what tasks," it often doesn't extend to the security room.

Re: How poker and a spaceship imposter game make you better at life

#23

Post by svara »

mckee1 wrote: post #3

There are many, many life lessons I have drawn from my youth spent playing poker semi-professionally. Perhaps the most consistently useful one was that, as mentioned in the article, one's performance should not be assessed purely on the outcome. In poker, you can play perfectly and still lose. That is true in almost every field of life. Or, to give it more nuance, you can play exceptionally well and only win a little…

Yeah, that's a really fundamental and important insight.

The way I like to think about it is that whenever you face uncertainty, your actions might seemingly be proven wrong in retrospect, but may still have been correct based on your past knowledge.

That's undoubtedly correct, but I find it sometimes difficult to apply, since there's always the possibility that you could have overlooked important information, or that you are using that logic as an excuse. In poker, different from real life, you always know exactly what you know and what you don't know.

Re: How poker and a spaceship imposter game make you better at life

#24

Post by metroholografix »

The author makes a lot of assumptions and oversimplifications whilst falling for the mystique of poker as expressed in popular culture. We've all seen the movies where psychological tells ("deception") end up saving (or ruining) the day during a poker game.

Unfortunately, in terms of winning strategies, this couldn't be further from how the game actually plays out today. Back when online poker exploded onto the scene, the old cash game pros quickly discovered that their way of playing the game (described in books like super system and theory of poker) was obsolete.

Seeing veteran poker pros getting crushed in their home turf by teenagers whose playing style was forged in the crucible of online multitabling was the ultimate expose to that old mystique of poker as a psychological battle of deception. One could say that the internet players through their mechanistic play were approximating strategies that were at their core, algorithmic. It's not at all surprising then, to see poker bots today utterly crush certain variants of the game. It won't be long, before poker as a whole succumbs.

Re: How poker and a spaceship imposter game make you better at life

#25

Post by me_me_me »

csours wrote: post #14

I tried this question with Dota: "What does Dota teach me about working with a software development team" The only really big one I came up with is that some people are just toxic and you have to mute them and play around them as best as possible.

Dota taught me a lot.

Especially how to insult people in Russian.

Re: How poker and a spaceship imposter game make you better at life

#26

Post by shadowgovt »

kwoff wrote: post #16

It's been interesting to see how popular "Among Us" has become. (I guess the problem for me is that, ahem, it's best played with a group of friends...) It does seem to make for a good game on Twitch, since several streamers can play together or with their chats. "Among Us" seems to be displacing the previous game "Town of Salem". Maybe people like the more real-time aspects? ("Among Us" also seems to inspire more "dr…

It's a highly social game, bordering on party game, which makes it different from most of my library of go-to games. Some of the most fun I've had is knowing I can't talk myself out of a situation, so go out as fun as I can.

"Purp did it. I was right there and saw 'em."

"Me too. We were both in the room and he just killed red."

"Listen. In my defense... I have this knife..."

Re: How poker and a spaceship imposter game make you better at life

#27

Post by vsareto »

metroholografix wrote: post #24

The author makes a lot of assumptions and oversimplifications whilst falling for the mystique of poker as expressed in popular culture. We've all seen the movies where psychological tells ("deception") end up saving (or ruining) the day during a poker game. Unfortunately, in terms of winning strategies, this couldn't be further from how the game actually plays out today. Back when online poker exploded onto the scene…

It seems there's a lot of deception around how to play poker, so this is the real meta-game of poker: convincing others to play poker badly!

(cue the often useless, recursive aspects of pop-culture game theory)

Re: How poker and a spaceship imposter game make you better at life

#29

Post by castratikron »

If you like Among Us, you should try Project Winter. Same concept but the game is more sophisticated in a few ways. (1) Everything is done by voice chat, which makes it a lot harder to fib. (2) The tasks and ways to sabotage are also more intricate than Among Us, which in that game are basically "click this button" whereas in Project Winter it involves crafting, going to the corners of the map (which is also a lot bigger) to find pieces, or combat. One of the tasks involves finding four digits across the map, so in that case it's very easy and effective to simply lie about which number you found and cause a lot of wasted time. (3) You can remove/kill anyone from the game but in Project Winter you don't know who was the imposter until the end of the game, so you're never certain how many are left.

Re: How poker and a spaceship imposter game make you better at life

#30

Post by Justsignedup »

There is another such game. Durak -- A russian game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durak

You should play 1v1 or 2v2.

The game involves random chance because of what cards you get.

The game involves strategy because of how you choose to attack and how you choose to defend, which can lead to major strategic advantages later on.

The game involves deception because your opponents can attack based on what you defend with, and when you lose the defense your opponent knows what weak cards you have. The goal is to give an impression of what strengths you have which are false.

Deception is definitely not the central focus of the game, but it helps. I noticed that someone skilled will typically win 7/10 games vs someone who is a novice.

Post reply on HN