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How to make decisions like a poker player

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Re: How to make decisions like a poker player

#151

Post by cthalupa »

in3d wrote: post #142
cthalupa wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of bots that can play GTO poker better than any human, yet they are consistently losers online at higher levels. Hold 'em, at least, still ain't fully solved.

There are only two ways they can be losers: they are not GTO or the rake is higher than their winnings. Hold’em is pretty much solved (almost because approximations were used for bet sizing). It is possible that you can do better by deviating from GTO to better exploit bad players but that makes you vulnerable to be exploited yourself.

That's sort of a no-true-scotsman argument: They lose because they're not playing true GTO.

Well, yes, but the point is that a fully GTO non-exploitable strategy is not solved for Hold'em. At least not outside of limit (and kinda no-limit) heads up play.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.08195.pdf

(There is also an argument that Libratus actually just approaches Nash equilibrium and isn't fully there, since there are 1e+160 decision points in a heads up no-limit game, but compared to human players the difference is probably meaningless. )

The closest we have seen for larger games is Pluribus - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aay2400 - but the researchers there aren't even attempting to say they have solved 6max, just that they could be less exploitable than some of the best in the world. It is not particularly useful for online play because it does not try to counter variance or manage bankroll, and in further results it began to lose quite heavily as the pros adapted to it, losing 700BB over the 10k hands.

By no means am I saying GTO-based strategy is ineffective - I'd probably be wasting my DTO subscription if I did think so ;) - but we're only part of the way there and the missing bits mean that you can't play perfectly unexploitable poker.

Re: How to make decisions like a poker player

#152

Post by kqr »

sokoloff wrote: post #113
lgas wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion may be of interest.

One major problem here is that many players dramatically overestimate their edge.

One of the rules of thumb you quickly learn when studying the Kelly criterion is that overestimation can lead to ruin, underestimation can at worst lead to slower growth.

Re: How to make decisions like a poker player

#153

Post by kqr »

prometheus76 wrote: post #116
curun1r wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Results-oriented thinking is just one of many human cognitive quirks that are often maladapted to the modern world. A major one is how we tend estimate probability. We naturally do that by equating it with how easy it is to imagine or remember it happening. This worked well in a tribal situation where our world was very small...if Grog got attacked by a tiger, there's a good chance that tiger attacks are a serious da…

Do you drive a car? I am asking because statistically speaking, it's the number one killer of people from age 21-65. Very few drivers go their whole life without getting in an accident. Statistically, on any given day, the odds of being in an accident are quite low. However, if you drive for 30-60 minutes every day, you are exposing yourself to a low amount of risk consistently over time, which inevitably means that…

> riding a bike would be a higher risk than driving because of lack of adequate road shoulders for much of the route between my workplace and home.

Is this an empirical statement or based on the same gut feeling that makes people feel safe in a car?

I'm asking because when you actually run the numbers, in most cases I've been involved in, you get to be very surprised to see just how safe cycling really is.

I don't know what the culture and road type is around your neck of the woods, but I would prefer a road without a proper shoulder most of the time -- simply because the existence of the shoulder provides very little actual safety, but it does give a sense of safety that makes drivers behave more dangerously near cyclists. Not to mention lower quality road surface, collected debris, etc.

Re: How to make decisions like a poker player

#154

Post by necovek »

kqr wrote: post #76
necovek wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the advice doesn't apply (they still claim Jane made a good decision, even though it led to a bad outcome: their point is that Jane should keep making good decisions, and not worry about bad outcomes because you can't control luck — if you mostly make good decisions, luck won't matter in the long run ), it's just that it's pretty much useless because > "Probability of getting it — you cannot know the ex…

There is no probability to know in the sense you mean -- probability is what we call our personal assessment of the situation, incorporating the (little) knowledge we have. So sure, there is your probability. Will you make money knowing it? That's the question you're alluding to. (As a concrete example: there is no "true" probability of rain six days from now. Either it rains or it doesn't. But a skilled meteorologis…

I was not referring to discreet outcomes at all (the old joke about everything having a 50% chance: it either happens or it does not).

My point is that with the available information when making most life decisions, we usually have no idea at all of even the ballpark chances of something turning one way or another.

Basically, the advice from the article is to incorporate luck into your estimations (both good and bad), and to use that to determine if a decision is good or bad, and then only go with good decisions (like a poker player would). And don't stress over bad (or good) outcomes if they were mostly due to really bad luck (i.e. something improbable has happened).

But if you don't know if chances of something happening are 10% or 90%, how do you incorporate that into your decision making?

What I am saying is that in life, we implicitely work to reduce the range (eg for a romantic partner, get to know them much better), but we've already decided to invest that much time with very slim chances of them turning out to be our lifelong partners.

Re: How to make decisions like a poker player

#155

Post by rawling »

Raidion wrote: post #146
rawling wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> serious but hobbyist > ~15k hands last month. Is that not roughly a full-time jobs' worth of poker? (15k hands > 12k minutes? > 200 hours > 6h/day)

I play online and multiple tables. 600 hands takes ~90 minutes at 6ish tables. Each table is ~75hands/h. I can play up to 12 at the same time, but my play suffers and I don't feel like I'm able to focus and get better.

Fair enough, thanks for indulging me!

Re: How to make decisions like a poker player

#156

Post by robocat »

stavros wrote: post #99
ricardobeat wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess the uptake will fall sharply somewhere around 10 million, which is still a life-changing amount of money for 99% of the population.

Huh, it's very odd to me that you'd take an even chance of dying to win $10m... My amount would be much, much higher, potentially infinite.

Any job that earns money has an implicit acceptable $ for death risk, because all jobs have a risk of death (proxy measurement of injury using ACC rates in New Zealand).

Your sum risk might be reduced (e.g. your job pays health insurance), but many jobs increase your risk e.g. just driving to work is dangerous.

Of course your primary finite resource is usually time (years of life), and your object function usually relates to quality of life (not $) . . . Win $ for risk of death is a poor metric.

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