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

altdeep.substack.com

31–40 of 98 posts

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

#31

I'm not really sure why they chose Among Us as an alternative to poker. Sure, it has a little chance and unknown information, but among us is really more of a social study to see how easily people can be swayed into voting people off. In my experience if I talk confidently and get the first word in it's pretty easy to cast aside suspicion. In fact, one meta strategy is to kill someone, then report the body yourself a…

The self-reporting strategy is easily countered by first voting off the person you're accusing, and then immediately you if that person turns out to be a crew member.

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

#32
post #27

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…

It seems there's a lot of deception around how to play poker, so this is the real meta-game of poker: convincing others to play poker badly! (cue the often useless, recursive aspects of pop-culture game theory)

Actually the entire point of poker is to make your opponent make a mistake or play poorly. A mistake being if you had perfect information a move you would not make.

Clarification: If you played with cards face up no one would ever make a mistake. You could calculate the odds and the math would be perfect. The goal of poker is to make an opponent make a mathematically incorrect play.

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

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several 'visual' tasks (medical scan, taking out trash, shields, shooting astroids) that allow's one to prove they are a ligitimate crewmember. Casting doubt on you as a 'self reporter'. Also things like the security camara's add even more dimensions to the game.

A high-risk, high-reward play I've seen is to kill someone, report the body, and claim you were on security camera and saw someone else do it. You can be caught out if it doesn't make sense for you to have been watching the cams, but while people keep a mental inventory of "who I saw doing what tasks," it often doesn't extend to the security room.

Really only works for one round though, since you'll be Emergency voted out if imposter reveals are on.

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

#34
Was just thinking about the cultural effect of people who hold deception to be ethically better than violence, vs. those who accept occasional violence as a price. The authors preference for teaching deception over domination is an example. Such timing.

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

#35

I'm not really sure why they chose Among Us as an alternative to poker. Sure, it has a little chance and unknown information, but among us is really more of a social study to see how easily people can be swayed into voting people off. In my experience if I talk confidently and get the first word in it's pretty easy to cast aside suspicion. In fact, one meta strategy is to kill someone, then report the body yourself a…

The self-reporting strategy is easily countered by first voting off the person you're accusing, and then immediately you if that person turns out to be a crew member.

That is the risk of self-reporting, although some people easily forget...

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

#36
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…

I like this comment and I learned the same lessons from golf and poker. Pay attention to the process and what you can control. As long as you make emotionless decisions and execute the process you shouldn't worry about the outcome. In fact the pressure of competing comes from the expectations you put on yourself by worrying about the outcome before you finish executing the process.

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

#37
post #6

An anecdote: I play a “home” online poker game with friends every Friday since quarantine started. It has been a great way to have some weekend fun and hangout (we zoom while we play). I love the “all-in” moments when you see the odds displayed for each hand and there’s still at least a turn/river left to watch. Watching the odds play out and seeing the occasional 3% chance win is so fun. I’d love to see odds annotat…

i think we all want to know what software you're using. Pokerrrrrrrrrrrrr 2 seems to be the default, and it's fine, but there has to be something better.

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

#38
post #6

An anecdote: I play a “home” online poker game with friends every Friday since quarantine started. It has been a great way to have some weekend fun and hangout (we zoom while we play). I love the “all-in” moments when you see the odds displayed for each hand and there’s still at least a turn/river left to watch. Watching the odds play out and seeing the occasional 3% chance win is so fun. I’d love to see odds annotat…

What software do you use for the actual poker game?

Discovered via the doc below, I've used lipoker.io and blockchain.poker. Both decent and accounts/logins not required https://docs.google.com/document/d/10iOD7Wy_YU4NmkPU7ZH7YTrq...

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

#39
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…

[deleted]

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

#40

This is a nitpick but maybe a slightly interesting one: in theory it's true that chess is not a "game" in this sense, but in practice it is not true. The "imperfect information" is all the paths that exist past the horizon of computation. When playing another human, that horizon is not very far away at all, so there is plenty of uncertainty. And it is absolutely possible to bluff to take advantage of a less well info…

Was going to say this.

You wouldn't see so many scholar's mate games if this was the case.

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