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Teach your kids poker, not chess

momentofdeep.substack.com

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Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#231

Post by 988747 »

bush-bby wrote: post #3

>However, it is important to distinguish poker from a pure game of chance, like roulette. I feel like this is becoming an all too common trope on social media and for young people, where poker is portrayed as a risky but cool thing to do because you can convince people you’re skilled or better than others at it, and that means taking other peoples money with skill. Which is indeed something cool. Sure there’s reading…

There's an easy way to distinguish "game of skill" from "game of chance" - just ask yourself: "Is there a World Championship for that game?"

Championships are organized only for games of skill, where you can have at least some chance of predicting the game outcome, make spectators care about this or that player. No one in their right mind would organize the championship in coin flip, or in MegaMillions lottery, because those game are pure chance, you can play them for decades and your chance of winning will be no better than that of a beginner. It would be hard to promote someone as "MegaMillions champion".

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#232

Post by abaldwin99 »

oneoff786 wrote: post #195
abaldwin99 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the bot is playing a Nash equilibrium then it doesn't need to devise the opponent's strategy. It's guaranteed to tie the opponent in the worst case (the opponent is also playing Nash equilibrium) or else win. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium However, if the opponent is playing sub-optimally you can win _more_ by deviating from Nash equilibrium to take advantage of their specific strategic shortcoming…

On its face that seems impossible to be true. Given any bet you could calculate the probability that the bot would fold given an all in raise if you had perfect knowledge of the bot and abuse it

At some point I want to write a long-form post with code proving my statements above. I walked through this scenario a long time ago using https://www.flopzilla.com/holdeq.html to find the equilibrium but it'd be neat to write open source code that does the number crunching and that way others could actually audit the proof.

The short of it though is there exists a perfect range of cards the bot can play where it neither folds enough for you to bluff to gain an edge, nor does it call enough that you can wait for better cards while bleeding chips to gain an edge.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#233

Post by oneoff786 »

dragontamer wrote: post #208
oneoff786 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pokémon gameplay can be deep but it’s pretty impenetrable for a kid just playing the game on his own. Most kids will just use the biggest attack moves, and that’s absolutely fine for the difficulty of the single player story made last I checked. I wouldn’t really want kids getting deep into an online community meta personally.

Even if the kids are just using the highest-attack moves and switching pokemon, that's still a deep game. That's the basics of "Pivoting" and "damage sponging". Many pokemon have self-recovery moves (slack off, recover, etc. etc.). Even when I was 10, I knew that if my sponge took a hit, and recovered the damage faster than my opponent could deal damage, I'd force them to switch. Set-up sweepers, hazards, status effe…

Seems like a pretty low bar tbh

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#235

Post by 99_00 »

mod wrote: post #103
99_00 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pricing risk is something I assume Pokémon doesn’t have. But I’m not going to encourage my kids to play poker. I will teach them the game if they want. But without the risk of actual material loss, the game loses a lot. Money is highly emotional. It’s gain or loss, the emotions that triggers, manipulating those emotions in others, predicting their behaviour based on their state, and even simulating “tilt” and present…

> And I’m not going to allow children to gamble with money I thought for a couple minutes about whether this was really noble, or flawed thinking. I didn't come to a conclusion. I doubt it's very important if children gamble with money or not. I think probably most of them do at one time or another, anyway.

My memories of gambling as a child were cheating, sore losers, reneging, and fights.

As an adult there are people who I just won't gamble with because of the above reasons, but they are in the minority. As a kid they seemed to be in the majority.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#236

Post by oneoff786 »

abaldwin99 wrote: post #232
oneoff786 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On its face that seems impossible to be true. Given any bet you could calculate the probability that the bot would fold given an all in raise if you had perfect knowledge of the bot and abuse it

At some point I want to write a long-form post with code proving my statements above. I walked through this scenario a long time ago using https://www.flopzilla.com/holdeq.html to find the equilibrium but it'd be neat to write open source code that does the number crunching and that way others could actually audit the proof. The short of it though is there exists a perfect range of cards the bot can play where it nei…

The reason I think this isn’t theoretically possible is that the bets aren’t binary. You have to specify a number. So with knowledge of the bot you could probably set up some strong priors on what they have.

I say this despite also claiming the top DL bot does this anyway and does very well.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#237

Post by antifa »

matwood wrote: post #162
routerl wrote: post #95

Nah, teach your kids chess, so that they can exercise their deductive/calculating muscles during that golden phase of childhood in which our brains are malleable enough to easily learn new languages: realize that artificial languages (i.e. deductive systems) are all functionally equivalent, and use chess as just another avenue into building deductive fluency; use multiple such avenues (e.g. music, Euclid). Call this…

> If you choose poker instead, you'll just breed a gambler. Huh? Chess is fun, but deals in perfect information at all times. Poker teaches a person how to make decisions with imperfect information, which is how most life decisions will be made.

Have you tried playing poker without gambling? Almost nobody who wants to play poker wants to do it without the gambling aspect.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#238

Post by daniel-cussen »

On the contrary, with surveillance these days, games of poker are turning into games of chess. There is no private information these days. Every character I type can be seen as I type this, with "flight time" meaning time between keypresses, and press time I forget the term for that, there's a term.

The only thing surveillance can't do, is see what I'll think in the following time period. A second in the future. Can't predict that, no amount of cams and AI models can see into the future that far. Actually can't, meaning that they cannot, predict the future. Can't do it. Apart from that, buy this data point for 6¢, sell this data point for 3¢, nag the user over every channel for a conversion.

But it's the only form of arbitrage left. The only barrier that is still a real barrier between anything. All the other barriers, geographic or legal, have collapsed. You just have time. That's it.

Can you see the future? You get a quadrillion dollars! No joke. Quadrillion dollar problem, like a billion Millennium Prizes.

Just say what will happen tomorrow, today.

Re: Teach your kids poker, not chess

#239

Post by ungamedplayer »

matwood wrote: post #162
routerl wrote: post #95

Nah, teach your kids chess, so that they can exercise their deductive/calculating muscles during that golden phase of childhood in which our brains are malleable enough to easily learn new languages: realize that artificial languages (i.e. deductive systems) are all functionally equivalent, and use chess as just another avenue into building deductive fluency; use multiple such avenues (e.g. music, Euclid). Call this…

> If you choose poker instead, you'll just breed a gambler. Huh? Chess is fun, but deals in perfect information at all times. Poker teaches a person how to make decisions with imperfect information, which is how most life decisions will be made.

We are all gamblers with the choices we make.
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