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

Good Poker Players Aren't Lucky

bloombergview.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 131 posts

Re: Good Poker Players Aren't Lucky

#81

Post by TylerE »

dred_blue wrote: post #77
TylerE wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, I expect a certain level of proof that you have won long-term at Roulette. A session win/loss log would be sufficient. The house edge in roulette is huge. Anyone claiming to be a winner at roulette in the long term is either lying or delusional. An equivalent claim would be someone claiming to double their money in the stock market every year for years on end.

Would you like the actual log or the script that makes the log? See the point? "Anyone claiming to be a winner at roulette in the long term is either lying or delusional." Possibly but you don't know this. Besides he doesn't claim "over the long term" and states WHY he quit playing. "The house edge in roulette is huge." Yes. IF the game is random. Read the post above.

It would still be more substantial than anything he has offered so far.

To make an assertion that a game of roulette in a licensed casino is not random is in the realm of moon landing conspiracy.

PS: I also think it's rather sad and transparent that you created a new shill account to reply to me.

Re: Good Poker Players Aren't Lucky

#82

Post by panorama »

727374 wrote: post #80
yodsanklai wrote: post #75

I wonder how well computers can play poker and also, how different it is to play online rather than with actual people around a table. I'm asking this because I once met a guy that was making a living playing online and it made me think. Would a computer program do better than a human in that context? It seems not to be the case, otherwise everybody would be using a program to replace them and humans player couldn't…

People are working on it (of course, since it could be extremely lucrative). However, the problem is 'hard' because No Limit Hold 'Em is really a game of bluffing and not math. The best human players alive have mastered the skill of determining the cards their opponents hold based on their moves in the current hand, the current game, and previous games. Online poker lacks the physical 'tells' that occur in a live gam…

This is largely incorrect. NLHE can be more about "bluffing" because there's greater variability between ones chance of winning a hand and the potential bet size. But it still comes down to a mathematical decision, just that it's more difficult to accurately calculate the best play given the wide range of variables: your opponent's likely holdings, the bet size, the pot size, your hand.

In Fixed Limit, the bet size and pot size are all controlled and can be pre-determined, leaving fewer permutations to solve. It's easy to calculate that if a bet is a constant, then you can profitably call with holdings from XY and "higher" in a given situation, but it obviously gets harder when the bet size can vary greatly.

To answer OP, Fixed Limit is considered solved (or close to it? Haven't been following the news on this) from a mathematical and game theory perspective, and so AIs have been built to play game theory optimally. NLHE is still far, far from being solved, but there are bots that have been created to churn out small, albeit automatic, wages short-stacking (to mitigate bet-size variability) smaller stakes games where its tendencies aren't as openly exploited.

Poker is very much a mathematical game. And physical tells, reaction-time tells online are pretty insignificant in the longrun.

Re: Good Poker Players Aren't Lucky

#85

Post by panorama »

lasermike026 wrote: post #65
sejje wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a complete nobody is not reflective of one's skill. That said, luck is the primary influence of outcome given a small enough time frame. It's also possible to have your mistakes "fixed" by luck. Moneymaker was not better than Farha, I'll give you that.

Watching Moneymaker win and then a series of others unknowns win convinced me that poker is a game of luck. Why are real rounders not winning?

They are. Overwhelmingly, in fact. You are almost certainly looking at a ridiculously small sample (probably just WSOP Main Events, of which the past several have had legitimately skilled winners).

Re: Good Poker Players Aren't Lucky

#86

Post by knodi123 »

KVFinn wrote: post #73

Is this skill-based rule is why every game in a casino is so bad? The article is about how poker is starting to be considered a game of skill and so not under the restrictions of gambling, and thus legal generally. Is there a similar law that is the inverse of this that restricts casinos to games of non-skill instead of actually good games? I mean, you'd never sit down with friends and play roulette or blackjack or a…

You are insightful in pointing out that I have absolutely zero interest in playing roulette with my friends, but I really mourn the way babies have ruined my group of poker buddies.

But regardless of the luck factors, I think the real distinction is that in poker, each player is competing against the others. But in blackjack, roulette, etc, each player is competing against the house.

Re: Good Poker Players Aren't Lucky

#87

Post by steven2012 »

mef wrote: post #13

His study of more than a billion hands of online Texas Hold’em found that 85.2 percent of the hands were decided without a show of cards. In other words, players’ betting decisions were of overwhelming importance in determining the outcome. Of the remaining 14.8 percent, almost half were won by a player who didn't hold the best hand but instead had induced the player with the best hand to fold before the showdown. Is…

85.2% of hands were won without a showdown, ie. getting to the river and everyone remaining showing their hands. This sounds exactly right, and I play a lot of poker. If someone induces someone to fold their hand without showing their hand, it means they were able to out-bet the person, which is skill-based.

Re: Good Poker Players Aren't Lucky

#88

Post by rtkwe »

KVFinn wrote: post #73

Is this skill-based rule is why every game in a casino is so bad? The article is about how poker is starting to be considered a game of skill and so not under the restrictions of gambling, and thus legal generally. Is there a similar law that is the inverse of this that restricts casinos to games of non-skill instead of actually good games? I mean, you'd never sit down with friends and play roulette or blackjack or a…

A casino consisting of skill based games probably wouldn't function well, unless it was entirely player vs player with the house only providing game administration and entertainment/drinks/etc. Why? There are two main ways casino's make money: betting against players, i.e. any game where the house pays money beyond bets place by the players (blackjack, roulette, etc) and incidentals, entertainment, drinks, hotel rooms, and the like. For the first you want luck based games where the house has a statistic edge where dealer/game runner skill has no affect on the outcome of the game. These games are great for the casino because all they need is a trained warm body to run the game correctly and a flow of people coming in.

Skill based games on the other hand are generally player vs player, where the house doesn't win or lose any money, like poker. The casino doesn't want to get involved with betting against the players in these types of games because to win consistently they would need to staff skilled people to play the games and pay them enough that playing the other side of the table is less lucrative. That's likely to be quite expensive. So instead casinos make money off of skill based games through the second less lucrative stream, incidentals, providing guests with food, drink, lodging, and entertainment. These are more expensive and aren't as reliable as just churning through people in non-skilled games.

tldr: Why are they so 'bad'? Because luck based games make the best money.

Re: Good Poker Players Aren't Lucky

#89

Post by steven2012 »

TylerE wrote: post #34
jqm wrote: post #30

Roulette is often held up as an example of "random chance" but this is not entirely true. There are on occasions patterns in Roulette, especially with certain dealers. In addition, there is a little trick casinos sometimes employ. They loosen the legs on the table to the point it wobbles slightly. The dealer will then lean against the table and watch as the ball is about to drop. They can then pop the ball out of an…

That's a load of rubbish submitted completely without any sort of proof. That might have gone on in a back-alley speakeasy in the Prohibition era, but in any sort of reputable casino - not a chance. The casino has no need to cheat at roulette. They have a built in edge.

You would be a fool if you believe casinos don't try to go above and beyond their statistical edge to make money.

Case in point:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/wynns-abnormal-lucky-streak...

I think we all know how a game with a statistical edge to the house has 9 straight quarters of larger-than-expected wins for the casino.

Re: Good Poker Players Aren't Lucky

#90

Post by pavelrub »

candybar wrote: post #18

As a casual poker player, I find this line of reasoning specious. Sports betting, blackjack and even roulette with a biased wheel are all games of skill by this definition. Poker games are designed specifically to appeal to our gambling instinct so that better players can play the house while worse players gamble away their chips. It's true that from the perspective of the best players, it's not truly gambling, but t…

I wanted to disagree at first, but actually I think you are making a valid point. There are obvious ways to treat poker as a game of skill, but this ignores the fact that gambling laws aren't just about some mathematical question of whether it's possible to think of a strategy that gets you positive EV (for poker, the answer is yes). Poker has certain properties which make it addictive to certain types of players who will most certainly lose, and the question is not whether it is possible to win through skill, but whether the less-skilled players should be protected from the psychologically-deceiving nature of the game. Even if skilled poker players might have the same numerical advantage as skilled basketball players, poker is different in its addictive nature and in the results it produces for the "losers" - which can be destructive.
Post reply on HN