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

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

#81

Post by osazuwa »

yellowstuff wrote: post #77
osazuwa wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I was the author of the post. Are you suggesting it is harder to bluff in online poker? Or that somehow taking the game online means bluffing doesn't work as well? Here is a good post on bots, if you haven't seen it: https://int8.io/counterfactual-regret-minimization-for-poker...

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 y…

> 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.

I wonder about this distinction. This seems it would make sense if all the players played the GTO strategy. Suppose one agent were to play the GTO strategy, but an other player was vulnerable to bluffing. It seems reasonable to "tune" the bluffs to that player.

In an extreme example, suppose every time a certain player would fold 100% of the time when another player played a certain way. It seems it would make sense for that other player to play that way when they wanted that player to fold, even under normal circumstances that play would be suboptimal.

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

#82

Post by boring_twenties »

osazuwa wrote: post #81
yellowstuff wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

> 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. I wonder about this distinction. This seems it would make sense if all the players played the GTO strategy. Suppose one agent were to play the GTO strategy, but an other player was vulnerable to bluffing. It seems reasonable to "tune" the bluffs to that player. In an extreme example…

That is absolutely correct. If everyone plays 100% GTO, then no one makes any money except the house. In order to actually profit, you need to deviate from the GTO strategy in order to exploit your opponent's mistakes.

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

#83

Post by crdrost »

osazuwa wrote: post #61
crdrost wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really fascinating to me as the article at least mischaracterizes chess. It is fascinating that it is also mischaracterizing poker and poker is much more robotic than stories have told me. That chess is less robotic, is perhaps not obvious. A postmodern skepticism of “even in principle” thinking is part of it: who cares what’s possible in principle, when in practice that is inaccessible to me? The actual narr…

I don't disagree. But the premise is not that getting good at making less blunders than your opponent in chess isn't fun or fulfilling. It is that getting good at making less blunders in chess doesn't transfer to real life decision-making as well as getting good at games like poker.

I just think that they have different things to teach us. Chess gives you transferable skills of thinking through problems backwards, thinking about timing and how to create time, thinking about how you might get trapped later.

By contrast, say, backgammon gives you a transferable skill of luck-creation and the strength of being vulnerable and well, I don't know what exactly cube management is but something to the effect of the wisdom about when to cut out early versus when to stick with something to the bitter end. They are different skills.

Baseball teaches a transferable skill of perseverance, of "hey you are going to miss most of the pitches and in fact if you consistently hit a 25% batting average you can easily ride that into a professional career."

Trying to evaluate any of these in terms of its impact on "real life decision-making" is probably doomed to failure, no?

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

#84

Post by fullshark »

klausjensen wrote: post #73
fullshark wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chosing insurance-package on the rental car, FWIW Insurance is a negative expected value "asset", but it makes sense to buy it (not in this case necessarily). A one time massive negative hit to your finances could be devastating compared to periodic insurance payments. Expected value is a simplified representation of the distribution of outcomes which is really what you should be thinking about regarding risk manag…

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 la…

I don't mean to defend this particular insurance, just point out that insurance is a negative expected value product (hence why insurance companies exist and are profitable) but it still makes sense to buy it a lot of the time.

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

#85

Post by im3w1l »

boring_twenties wrote: post #82
osazuwa wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I wonder about this distinction. This seems it would make sense if all the players played the GTO strategy. Suppose one agent were to play the GTO strategy, but an other player was vulnerable to bluffing. It seems reasonable to "tune" the bluffs to that player. In an extreme example…

That is absolutely correct. If everyone plays 100% GTO, then no one makes any money except the house. In order to actually profit, you need to deviate from the GTO strategy in order to exploit your opponent's mistakes.

Playing GTO against a poor player will make you money. This isn't the case in every game (rock paper scissor is the canonical example), but it is true in poker.

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

#86

Post by im3w1l »

david927 wrote: post #7

I had a game that made me better at life once. Back in the 90's, I played a game called Command & Conquer. And if I used all my resources, I could attack an enemy base and defeat it. But on one game, I didn't leave enough resources behind to survive a counter attack. I replayed it over and over each time, to my surprise, making the same mistake. I finally forced myself to have more of a backup. And I realized that I…

But you didn't answer the question.. Why have savings? Why not spend it all on the project? I think the story is incomplete if you save but don't know why.

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

#87

Post by im3w1l »

svara wrote: post #23
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 tha…

In one sense, if you have overlooked important information, then you don't have it. And looking for overlooked information is itself an action, with costs and benefits that you need to evaluate with your current information.

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

#88

Post by otoburb »

csours wrote: post #80
otoburb wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one thing that always drove me to keep playing when I had more time was the sweet nectar of being part of a high-performing team . When everything clicked together and you knew that you could rely on your teammates during the ebbs and flows across lanes. I miss those days.

Yes, I switched teams at work to be on a high-performing team. All the high performing people left the team for one reason or another. I still felt like there were interesting problems to solve, but my outlook became rather depressed for a while. I don't know whether I should have stayed around after the high-performers left.

The next best thing I miss from online team games was training newbies and seeing them perform at a high level (over time). The conversion rate was very low (20-25%), but if I'm being honest that made the reward all the sweeter.

However, I appreciate and understand that work place dynamics are the real world where external factors can play outsized roles and "performance" is often much harder to measure directly.

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

#89

Post by AlwaysRock »

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…

I don't know if the author meant playing poker online or at a competitive level. I play poker with a group of friends, that were all somewhat skilled before we started playing together, and I certainly flex all of the skills he mentioned.

The most interesting part now is the meta. Once you know someone well it's easier to find their tells. Unless they know that and adjust. The final 4 at the table is really fun every week.

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

#90

Post by im3w1l »

subandi wrote: post #57
[deleted] wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

The problem here is, in professional poker, the long run might never come. In online poker, every hand you play is tracked and can be analysed and people have "run bad" over hundreds of thousands of hands; more than a casino-player will ever see in their life at 20 hands per hour.

It should be dependent on your edge no? With tiny edge you can run bad way longer than you can with a big one. And in live-play you should be able to find a table with a huge edge.
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