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Jane Street's Figgie card game

figgie.com

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Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#111

Post by dmurray »

thehappyfellow wrote: post #60
LPisGood wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you play in person? Are the cards for sale somewhere?

Just a normal deck is fine, you have to prepare it but it’s not a big deal.

I assume this was originally played with normal decks, but the screenshots show special decks with only suits.

Doesn't this make a difference to gameplay? With normal suits, if you trade a few times, you may be able to establish that twelve distinct cards are in a suit even though you never saw more than say four of them at once

Maybe there typically isn't enough trading for this to make a difference? If there is, it does introduce an extra skill to the game of remembering the cards that have been seen before. That's valuable in lots of card games including some poker variants, but it doesn't seem like something JS would emphasize training.

If you have 12 identical decks you can turn them into 13 Figgie decks by combining all the cards of each value.

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#112

Post by zusammen »

noname123 wrote: post #94
lewiscarson wrote: post #6

There is a fantastic blog post by Ross Rheingans-Yoo about the shortcomings of poker as a tool to teach trading and why Figgie is a better one. https://blog.rossry.net/figgie/ He also wrote an equally brilliant eulogy about Max Chiswick, one of his colleagues, who helped him develop it. https://blog.rossry.net/chisness/

Beautiful eulogy. I don't know the author nor the eulogized but reading the eulogy made me appreciate people like those two (poker players, options traders, sports gamblers etc). I often see in HN comments about how trading and Wall St in general is evil - when I feel completely the opposite. The two inventors of Figgie may not have contributed directly to curing cancer, saving the dolphins or the whales - dare I pos…

I often see in HN comments about how trading and Wall St in general is evil

Trading is one of the least evil things that goes on on Wall Street. Starting wars for profit (e.g., Blackwater) and buying additional houses as investments (as private equity firms do) and making massive job cuts while posting record profits, are all evil. I loathe capitalism but I agree that quants and traders are some of the least compromised people, whereas “change the world” techies and now techzis are the worst. Traders are, as you said, honest about their motivations.

Ultimately there is no ethical production or consumption in a system as rotten as ours, and everyone has to make a choice. Graveyards are full of moral people, and country clubs are full of humanity’s absolute worst. And if one has children, the argument can be made that failing to provide for them is ethically worse than taking a job within capitalism so long as one isn’t directly harming anyone.

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#113

Post by htamas »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #75
lewiscarson wrote: post #6

There is a fantastic blog post by Ross Rheingans-Yoo about the shortcomings of poker as a tool to teach trading and why Figgie is a better one. https://blog.rossry.net/figgie/ He also wrote an equally brilliant eulogy about Max Chiswick, one of his colleagues, who helped him develop it. https://blog.rossry.net/chisness/

I play poker. It really takes thousands of hours to understand the game from a strategic point of view. Then when you have a few very good players, maybe you can start talking about psychology.

Any learning material you can recommend?

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#114

Post by filoleg »

colesantiago wrote: post #65
LPisGood wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or data harvesting, or making games with addictive micro transactions, or…most industries.

Most industries don't make billions of dollars betting on the demise of other industries and also not giving anything back to society. Traders, private equity, hedge funds fall in this bucket.

> not giving anything back to society.

> Traders, private equity, hedge funds fall in this bucket.

How do you think the money in 401k, pension funds (government, teachers, etc.), S&P500, and any other financial instruments typically relied on by all sorts of average people grow? Do you think they appear out of thin air by the magic will of the market?

Or maybe there is some mechanism through which efficient price discovery happens in a way that benefits both the average people utilizing common investment vehicles and those who actively manage/administer those?

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#115

Post by 392 »

kqr wrote: post #108
jjallen wrote: post #83

I looked at this. I don’t fully understand the game yet. One thing I do not like is the emphasis of speed. Humans should not be making fast financial decisions, trading or otherwise. Sure you could improve with this game. But you don’t have to be able to make fast decisions to be successful in finance.

I feel the same, but I'm not intellectually convinced. You make up like half the ante in expectation on a random hand (on average dealt two cards of the goal suit, for 20 points against the ante of 40.) If you can find 4 trades with a 5 point spread profit you'll make the rest of the ante back. That's a full minute for each trade, i.e. not that stressful. What I do find stressful is how fast the bots react to obvious…

Just like real trading :')

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#116

Post by AngryData »

LPisGood wrote: post #61
thehappyfellow wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a normal deck is fine, you have to prepare it but it’s not a big deal.

I think that is kind of a big deal. You either need to prepare many identical decks in advance or come up with an elaborate selection procedure you repeat every 4 minutes.

I don't think it would be too hard. After the round players throw their cards in by suit face up to 4 piles, every suit gets topped up to 12 cards. Have one person take all four suits under the table and then hands them in random order to the dealer. The dealer randomizes them themselves so nobody can know which suit is which, then removes the required number of cards from the random suits and discards them, and shuffles the deck.

Obviously it isn't super quick, but once people know whats going on it doesn't take that long either.

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#117

Post by AngryData »

humodz wrote: post #78
vessenes wrote: post #3

Love this. I’d really like to play with real cards, but the uneven suit setup makes that tough as a party game unless the host sits out. I guess you could prepare a bunch of decks ahead of time. At 4 minutes a round you’d need maybe 10 decks for an hour of playing though. To even it out I guess you’d have 12? But that means you’d have more info about what’s likely in later rounds.. Hmm. Maybe I can nerd snipe some in…

1. Grab at least 4 cards of each suit 2. Sort them to follow a repeating pattern of 4 distinct suits, e.g. ♥♦♣♠♥♦♣♠♥♦♣♠... 2. Cut the deck, putting the top part under the bottom part 3. (The deck will still have that pattern, but shifted by an unknown amount) 4. Counting out from the top, remove the following cards: - 1st, 5th, 9th, 13th - 2nd, 6th - 3rd, 7th Or: take 3, skip 1, take 3, skip 1, take 1, skip 3, take 1…

That is a much cleverer solution than I thought up using two different people to randomize the set of 4 suits against each other to prevent peeks.

I guess either works though. For speed you would likely want the players to help either sort by suit or sort by a 4 suit pattern.

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#118

Post by AngryData »

colesantiago wrote: post #29

While this is a fun intellectually stimulating nerd toy for engineers, trading just doesn’t make sense to me. Making massive sums of money from bad policies of governments, shorting companies or even entire countries and making money from wars by shorting and longing commodities is a repugnant way of making money and is immoral. This is no better than crypto trading and gambling.

I have to agree with you in a lot of cases. It is basically too many middle men jumping into the space between buyers and sellers and gambling with the different expectations between them and putting in a lot of work to scrape every potential extra penny.

There is some value in being the messenger, but of course they decide to try gambling with their messages and offers in order to try and extract more value out of their message than it is really worth. And they justify it with their overly convoluted story about having to trade through 6 different people, all of whom are trying to scam each other and end up sending 2nd and 3rd and 4th messages of their own farther down the line letting everybody else see a deal is coming and trying to interject themselves in it to extract more value. Until eventually the seller was driven down to the bare minimum sale price, and the buyer it driven up to the maximum cost they can afford. Both buyer and seller are worse off, but all the gambling middlemen came out of it feeling satisfied that they spent all day pretending they aren't complicit because they only dealt with other middlemen and ignore the fact that the group of them as a whole are scamming buyers and sellers.

They justify scalping products by claiming they mostly only deal with other scalpers and as long as the scalped products are moving around pretend they are providing value.

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#119

Post by colesantiago »

filoleg wrote: post #114
colesantiago wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most industries don't make billions of dollars betting on the demise of other industries and also not giving anything back to society. Traders, private equity, hedge funds fall in this bucket.

> not giving anything back to society. > Traders, private equity, hedge funds fall in this bucket. How do you think the money in 401k, pension funds (government, teachers, etc.), S&P500, and any other financial instruments typically relied on by all sorts of average people grow? Do you think they appear out of thin air by the magic will of the market? Or maybe there is some mechanism through which efficient price dis…

And?

There is a difference between making staggeringly unhealthy amounts of money in days, than making money slowly over decades.

Traders do next to nothing and are able to acquire this relatively quickly and not give anything of value back.

If your idea of placing your money in a pension fund and locking it up for 40 years and only then you are 60+ years old able to use it a way of giving back to society.

Then you might as well say you’ve been scammed of your time slaving away only to enjoy that money when you have little time left.

Every employee with a pension is praying for their pensions to go up continuously for decades, traders can bet both ways of the market and still end up rich.

One recession and you’ll get a lot of disillusioned employees whose pensions are worth less than they put in years ago.

Re: Jane Street's Figgie card game

#120

Post by lovich »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #107
lovich wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am certain in the same way that I am certain there is not a teapot in the same orbit as earth but conveniently on the opposite side of the sun so that it may never be observed. The hullabaloo about seed oils showed up roughly 5-6 years ago, has no scientific backing beyond the level that gets you flat earthers and climate change deniers, and is now being touted by people like you as something I must be so confident…

There’s a long history of producers making something unhealthy, and suppressing evidence it is unhealthy (cigarettes, corn syrup, milk formula, bacon, the list is quite long). It’s _not that remarkable_ if they’re doing the same thing here. I don’t believe the seed oil thing, this is my first time hearing about it; I just don’t think it’s hard to believe evidence about seed oil health could be suppressed. Given the l…

The seed oil advocates are not asking for proof that a new substance is healthy before accepting is use. They took something that as existed for as long as humans have known you can crush seeds to get oil out of them, have actively harmful properties that they can explain.

They have no evidence and make active claims. If you want to join their side on that flimsy logic because it sounds mean or you don’t like big pharma then enjoy the company you keep

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