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

> In my experience if I talk confidently and get the first word in it's pretty easy to cast aside suspicion.

Do you usually play with friends? This is definitely not a stable strategy in the repeated Among Us game with the same players :) (although it is quite effective to start! Assuming nobody else is also using it.)

> Another strategy is to follow someone for a bit in the beginning, such that if you were the imposter you could've killed them, leading them to trust you. Then in voting sessions that person will likely vouch for you.

This is called being a “third impostor” (whenever there are two impostors in the round [0]) and it appears to be a little bit more stable, but then casts suspicion on you once you start leaving between kills, among other things. So it’s not fully stable, but some amount of randomness in your playing can also make this strategy viable. (I.e., doing the same when you’re both an impostor and a crew mate with nonzero probability.)

I almost always play the variant where we cannot know whether the person voted out was an impostor or not, so read the above with that in mind. The other variation (where voted players have their type revealed) one also has interesting meta-game strategies like “vouching,” where a player will say “if you vote red and they aren’t the Impostor, then immediately vote me.” This strategy is only exploitable as an impostor when they are close to a win, which makes it a very strong signal of truthfulness in the early game [1].

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[0] And is usually just called (n+1)th impostor whenever there are n impostors in a round.

[1] Impostors can exploit this in the late game, if the cooldown for emergency meetings is long-ish. For example: whenever an impostor pair is three kills away from a win, an impostor can kill (leaving two people for a win), self-report, and then vouch. Then the pair can just do a double kill and win immediately after the end of voting + cooldown.

As far as I know, it is not even possible for me to rent a car completely without insurance and thereby risk having to pay for the full value of the car. :)

So it is really about what kind of deductible you will have vs. what you pay for it.

If I save 100 EUR 10 times renting a car and I expect to have one damage costing me 1000 EUR every 10 times I rent a car - it is neutral EV.

If you can't afford the "hit" of a large deductible if an accident happes, then it would make sense to pay more here and now to reduce or eliminate that risk.

I have saved thousands of euros over the years by electing to go with the included insurance, which typically is around 1000-1500EUR deductible, if I remember correctly.

So if I crash my rental car the next three times I rent a car and have to pay 3x1000EUR deductible, I will still be in the green.

Last time I picked an upgraded insurace, it was because we were a group that rented together, and I didn't want to risk friendsships over who might have dented the car etc. :)

> This is only true when playing with others attempting to play optimally.

It's also true against someone who is playing an exploitative strategy.

Von Neumann proved that there exists an unexploitable strategy for any zero sum game, where playing that strategy gives you the best possible outcome if your opponent knows your strategy and can play perfectly against it. Poker players refer to this strategy as "Game Theory Optimal". It is not necessarily "optimal" in the sense of making the most money in real life, EG if your opponent always folds to big bets then you should bet big more often than a GTO strategy would.

Over the last 15 years or so high level poker strategy has increasingly focused on approximating GTO play, and people are moving away from any type of exploitative play, whether that's psychological tells or adjusting to weaknesses like an opponent folding too much. So a GTO player actually will bluff quite frequently, but it's due to the math indicating that it's an advantageous spot to do it, not because of anything he's observed about his opponent.

That said, there's still room to adjust to exploit an opponent, and the weaker the opponent is the more profitable it can be to deviate from "correct" play.

The funny thing is there are a lot of pro chess players that are really strong poker players not as much the other way around so chess lends to poker guess the author should start with chess.