How poker and a spaceship imposter game make you better at life • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by ryandrake » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:30 PM UTC

petesamrogers wrote: post #38

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

There are so many different software platforms for poker in 2020 it's not even funny. So much competition and innovation. I have about half a dozen poker groups that play regularly (some daily) together, and while most of them settled on PokerStars and PokerBros, others are using Poker Mavens (self hosted), PokerNow, Pokerrrr, etc. I thought COVID-19 would kill poker but it really seems to be going through a revitalization with everyone bored at home.

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

#52

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:32 PM UTC

auspex wrote: post #32

vsareto wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#53

Post by plazmatic » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:34 PM UTC

No. Just no. It's quite frankly sad that Among Us is so popular. It speaks to how a large portion of current "gamers" literally have no idea what a good game is, so they settle for something that simply lets them argue with people...and that somehow substitutes for an actual game.

It's kind of sad to see where gaming is in 2020 as compared to the Golden Era of gaming in the mid 2000 to late 2000's.

Oh well. At least most of these people have no idea what they missed out on.

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

#54

Post by spelunker » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:38 PM UTC

kwoff wrote: post #16

It's been interesting to see how popular "Among Us" has become. (I guess the problem for me is that, ahem, it's best played with a group of friends...) It does seem to make for a good game on Twitch, since several streamers can play together or with their chats. "Among Us" seems to be displacing the previous game "Town of Salem". Maybe people like the more real-time aspects? ("Among Us" also seems to inspire more "dr…

Social deduction games and bluffing games are some of my favorites and usually crowd pleasers - Mafia, all of the versions of Warewolf, all of the versions of Resistance, the list goes on. I've never tried the online versions... guess I'll have to give it a spin.

If you haven't tried "offline" versions of these games they're a blast.

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

#55

Post by subandi » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:46 PM UTC

mckee1 wrote: 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 was a professional poker player in another life and I agree; learning not to be result-orientated is one of the biggest life-lessons it thought me. Deciding to flip a coin for money where you get paid 3x your bet if you win, as long as you can afford to lose half of the time, is correct, regardless of outcome.

The other one is not being afraid of "tough" decisions - often, decisions are tough because all options are close in value. The closer their value is, the less it matters to choose the "correct" path, keeping in mind the future is unknowable and we always have imperfect information.

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

#56

Post by pmoriarty » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:49 PM UTC

An underappreciated fact about poker is how easy it is to get cheated.

Even professional poker players can get cheated out of a lot of money in a private game.[1]

It's even easier to cheat amateurs.

There are all sorts of methods cheats can employ, from having accomplices[2] to using marked decks[3] or other cheating paraphernalia about which most amateur players are absolutely clueless.

Cheating online is even easier... if you're the one running the poker servers. Online poker is like online voting. It's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63jgfmgqkO0

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cnQlz0ZHG4

[3] - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=marked+decks

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

#57

Post by subandi » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:52 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #39

mckee1 wrote: 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]

The problem here is, in professional poker, the long run might never come.

In online poker, every hand you play is tracked and can be analysed and people have "run bad" over hundreds of thousands of hands; more than a casino-player will ever see in their life at 20 hands per hour.

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

#58

Post by shadowgovt » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:54 PM UTC

aequitas wrote: post #46

shadowgovt wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Imho, if you where a teammate and not a imposter, you should be voted out regardless if you're just lurking in security and not doing your tasks, so we can finish the game. But then there might be little incentive for you to do your tasks as ghost anyways. Or you can withhold doing tasks as ghost on purpose just to spite the crewmates that voted you out. Like I said this game has many dimensions, wheel within wheels.

The rule I've learned from Mr. Fruit videos is do the tasks first, then you have all the time in the world for monitors.

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

#59

Post by osazuwa » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:55 PM UTC

metroholografix wrote: post #24

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…

Thanks. I was the author of the post. Are you suggesting it is harder to bluff in online poker? Or that somehow taking the game online means bluffing doesn't work as well?

Here is a good post on bots, if you haven't seen it: https://int8.io/counterfactual-regret-minimization-for-poker...

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

#60

Post by klausjensen » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 3:56 PM UTC

The best lesson I learned from poker is the concept of "expected value". [1]

It takes some of the grief out of undesired outcomes - because you made the right decision based on the information you had, and chance just happened to not be in your favor in this case.

It affects how I make all kinds of business- and life-decisions. Chosing insurance-package on the rental car, investing in stock, trusting people etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value