How poker and a spaceship imposter game make you better at life | Hacker News Reader

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

altdeep.substack.com

74 pointsosazuwa90 comments

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, the old cash game pros quickly discovered that their way of playing the game (described in books like super system and theory of poker) was obsolete.

Seeing veteran poker pros getting crushed in their home turf by teenagers whose playing style was forged in the crucible of online multitabling was the ultimate expose to that old mystique of poker as a psychological battle of deception. One could say that the internet players through their mechanistic play were approximating strategies that were at their core, algorithmic. It's not at all surprising then, to see poker bots today utterly crush certain variants of the game. It won't be long, before poker as a whole succumbs.

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.

This isn't quite correct although that's how poker was taught in the 90s. The goal of the top players these days is to play as close as possible to optimal poker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium) and not worry about the individual hand their opponent might have in a given moment.

This is only true when playing with others attempting to play optimally. If you only play optimal poker it may be difficult to take advantage of sub optimal players without modifying play.

A simple example is a rock paper scissors tournament. The nash equilibrium says you must always simply pick each with 1/3 chance. But if you play this you are almost gauranteed to finish in the middle of the pack. The winner is going to be someone who can take advantage of other players. There used to be a rps AI tournament years ago (UofAlberta I think), and this is why they wouldn’t take submissions that only played nash equilibrium play.

But you are right, in that usually the first step in getting good at poker is to simply play the strength of your cards based on your position. And this becomes more amd more important the higher the stakes since players tend to be better there.

> This is only true when playing with others attempting to play optimally.

It's also true against someone who is playing an exploitative strategy.

I don't think this is true. It's a better strategy to keep bad players in the game by giving them real advice. To ensure they grow and have fun. But not so much advice that they surpass you. That's their own responsibility to seek out.

When those bad players stop playing badly the games die. It is super boring to play live poker with players that don't make mistakes. I know from experience

If people are just folding and folding maybe try playing shorthanded? Then optimal play is much more aggressive and fun.

Nope, even heads-up is boring live with people that play well because you are wasting more time shuffling than playing.

Even on-line heads-up challenges are played on 2 tables in order to not be boring and that is 500-600+ hands per hour

The way you write is reminiscent of an Adam Curtis documentary and I think it's quite beautiful.

This is really fascinating to me as the article at least mischaracterizes chess. It is fascinating that it is also mischaracterizing poker and poker is much more robotic than stories have told me.

That chess is less robotic, is perhaps not obvious. A postmodern skepticism of “even in principle” thinking is part of it: who cares what’s possible in principle, when in practice that is inaccessible to me? The actual narrative is me versus this player, my blunders versus her blunders, and whoever blunders less wins. There is a Platonic Form of perfect play that has no blunders? It is discovered by computers? See, this is something I had to acclimate to in learning chess, because chess engines are available, they will rank your games and tell you that this opening is slightly better than that opening by a tenth of a pawn, and you have to like just throw them in the trash. It's like a standard of beauty that demands you have half a percent body fat and rippling abs and bench 300 easy. And instead you have the desire to be Interesting, rather than to be True.

I play some openings because they are silly, you chase my knight in a massive circle around the board and then I am totally undeveloped but you are questionably developed and it is not clear you are doing better. Gone are the days of memorized 20-deep trees of Sicilian openings where I got a careful half-pawn advantage in my theory and then turned out to blunder my queen and erase it all. That was, if you like, a half-life.

I don't disagree. But the premise is not that getting good at making less blunders than your opponent in chess isn't fun or fulfilling. It is that getting good at making less blunders in chess doesn't transfer to real life decision-making as well as getting good at games like poker.

I just think that they have different things to teach us. Chess gives you transferable skills of thinking through problems backwards, thinking about timing and how to create time, thinking about how you might get trapped later.

By contrast, say, backgammon gives you a transferable skill of luck-creation and the strength of being vulnerable and well, I don't know what exactly cube management is but something to the effect of the wisdom about when to cut out early versus when to stick with something to the bitter end. They are different skills.

Baseball teaches a transferable skill of perseverance, of "hey you are going to miss most of the pitches and in fact if you consistently hit a 25% batting average you can easily ride that into a professional career."

Trying to evaluate any of these in terms of its impact on "real life decision-making" is probably doomed to failure, no?

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...

Von Neumann proved that there exists an unexploitable strategy for any zero sum game, where playing that strategy gives you the best possible outcome if your opponent knows your strategy and can play perfectly against it. Poker players refer to this strategy as "Game Theory Optimal". It is not necessarily "optimal" in the sense of making the most money in real life, EG if your opponent always folds to big bets then you should bet big more often than a GTO strategy would.

Over the last 15 years or so high level poker strategy has increasingly focused on approximating GTO play, and people are moving away from any type of exploitative play, whether that's psychological tells or adjusting to weaknesses like an opponent folding too much. So a GTO player actually will bluff quite frequently, but it's due to the math indicating that it's an advantageous spot to do it, not because of anything he's observed about his opponent.

That said, there's still room to adjust to exploit an opponent, and the weaker the opponent is the more profitable it can be to deviate from "correct" play.

> but it's due to the math indicating that it's an advantageous spot to do it, not because of anything he's observed about his opponent.

I wonder about this distinction. This seems it would make sense if all the players played the GTO strategy. Suppose one agent were to play the GTO strategy, but an other player was vulnerable to bluffing. It seems reasonable to "tune" the bluffs to that player.

In an extreme example, suppose every time a certain player would fold 100% of the time when another player played a certain way. It seems it would make sense for that other player to play that way when they wanted that player to fold, even under normal circumstances that play would be suboptimal.

That is absolutely correct. If everyone plays 100% GTO, then no one makes any money except the house. In order to actually profit, you need to deviate from the GTO strategy in order to exploit your opponent's mistakes.

Playing GTO against a poor player will make you money. This isn't the case in every game (rock paper scissor is the canonical example), but it is true in poker.

Perhaps, but much less money than exploiting the poor player's many mistakes.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't GTO only valid for 2-player games - i.e. no Nash equlibria for 3 or more player games exist? If so, then "solving" poker by finding good enough approximation of GTO strategy only works for heads-up poker, which is a variant almost no one plays nowadays. Of course, in multiplayer games GTO is extremely useful where there's only two players left in the pot (you can view the remainder of the hand as a two player game and find GTO strategy for that game), but you still need a strategy for the remaining situations.

It's complicated. The short version is that a Nash equilibrium exists for multiplayer games, so there is a GTO strategy for multiplayer poker, but it is not as useful in theory or practice if pots are frequently multiway post flop.

This article explains it better than I could:

http://blog.gtorangebuilder.com/2014/03/gto-poker-outside-of...

I don't know if the author meant playing poker online or at a competitive level. I play poker with a group of friends, that were all somewhat skilled before we started playing together, and I certainly flex all of the skills he mentioned.

The most interesting part now is the meta. Once you know someone well it's easier to find their tells. Unless they know that and adjust. The final 4 at the table is really fun every week.

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 and immediately accuse someone else. I've done this when someone witnessed me killing someone, and I actually got -them- voted off. It's all good and fun but I did feel rather scummy for a bit after. :)

Another strategy is to follow someone for a bit in the beginning, such that if you were the imposter you could've killed them, leading them to trust you. Then in voting sessions that person will likely vouch for you.

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.

There are so many things that can be configured (eg visual tasks can be turned off because they make the game trivially easy for a group that plays together often), it's interesting watching people adapt the game to their group and play level/maturity in the game.

The game is so simple, and the meta-game is pretty simple too, but the meta-meta-game changes every round as people die and are voted off. It really hurt my brain quite a bit until I figured out that I was watching a meta-meta-game; and it still does hurt my brain a bit.

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.

Depends, I've had a game where I was not the imposter but had 3 crewmates voted out on reports I made, yet I was not voted out myself. I would have been really suspicious of someone by that point myself.

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.

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...

There is a rule variation that disables confirmation of whether the person you're voting off was a crewmate or imposter --- this variation makes the "kill, self-report, blame other person" strategy viable. It's a simple change, but it really spices things up!

> In my experience if I talk confidently and get the first word in it's pretty easy to cast aside suspicion.

Do you usually play with friends? This is definitely not a stable strategy in the repeated Among Us game with the same players :) (although it is quite effective to start! Assuming nobody else is also using it.)

> Another strategy is to follow someone for a bit in the beginning, such that if you were the imposter you could've killed them, leading them to trust you. Then in voting sessions that person will likely vouch for you.

This is called being a “third impostor” (whenever there are two impostors in the round [0]) and it appears to be a little bit more stable, but then casts suspicion on you once you start leaving between kills, among other things. So it’s not fully stable, but some amount of randomness in your playing can also make this strategy viable. (I.e., doing the same when you’re both an impostor and a crew mate with nonzero probability.)

I almost always play the variant where we cannot know whether the person voted out was an impostor or not, so read the above with that in mind. The other variation (where voted players have their type revealed) one also has interesting meta-game strategies like “vouching,” where a player will say “if you vote red and they aren’t the Impostor, then immediately vote me.” This strategy is only exploitable as an impostor when they are close to a win, which makes it a very strong signal of truthfulness in the early game [1].

-----

[0] And is usually just called (n+1)th impostor whenever there are n impostors in a round.

[1] Impostors can exploit this in the late game, if the cooldown for emergency meetings is long-ish. For example: whenever an impostor pair is three kills away from a win, an impostor can kill (leaving two people for a win), self-report, and then vouch. Then the pair can just do a double kill and win immediately after the end of voting + cooldown.

I had a game that made me better at life once.

Back in the 90's, I played a game called Command & Conquer. And if I used all my resources, I could attack an enemy base and defeat it. But on one game, I didn't leave enough resources behind to survive a counter attack. I replayed it over and over each time, to my surprise, making the same mistake. I finally forced myself to have more of a backup.

And I realized that I was living my life that way. I had very little in the way of backup. In my mind, it took away from whatever I was trying to do. "Why have savings? That money could be spent on my project!" It was a good lesson and I owe it to that moment, in that game.

But you didn't answer the question.. Why have savings? Why not spend it all on the project? I think the story is incomplete if you save but don't know why.

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, whereas someone has had greater luck can play relatively poorly and win a lot.

There is also an interesting life analogy that I like : During a tournament, an often underestimated skill is choosing your table (and thus your opponents).

That skill applies to poker but only to cash games, not tournaments. In a tournament you can't choose your table, it's assigned randomly.

"In poker, you can play perfectly and still lose."

Only true over the short term: all you have to do is play GTO poker over an infinite number of hands in a rake free game and you should at least break even I think!

That said, this fact is the main reason that the game of poker really "works". If playing perfectly (or at least at a much higher level than your opponents) allowed you to always best your opponents, then you'd quickly find yourself out of opponents. There needs to be enough luck involved to keep losing players coming back to the table (the same reason most casino games have a thin house edge).

Poker can be an absolutely soul crushing game to play professionally. "Running bad" where you lose money over 10's or 100's of thousands of hands even while playing well can make you seriously question your sanity. It can also cause you to add subtle (or not so subtle) errors into your game (e.g. playing too cautiously or aggressively) which can turn your once winning game into a losing game, making it tough to decide whether you are currently a winning player running bad, or actually a losing player.

Yeah, that's a really fundamental and important insight.

The way I like to think about it is that whenever you face uncertainty, your actions might seemingly be proven wrong in retrospect, but may still have been correct based on your past knowledge.

That's undoubtedly correct, but I find it sometimes difficult to apply, since there's always the possibility that you could have overlooked important information, or that you are using that logic as an excuse. In poker, different from real life, you always know exactly what you know and what you don't know.

In one sense, if you have overlooked important information, then you don't have it. And looking for overlooked information is itself an action, with costs and benefits that you need to evaluate with your current information.

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.

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.

There is another such game. Durak -- A russian game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durak

You should play 1v1 or 2v2.

The game involves random chance because of what cards you get.

The game involves strategy because of how you choose to attack and how you choose to defend, which can lead to major strategic advantages later on.

The game involves deception because your opponents can attack based on what you defend with, and when you lose the defense your opponent knows what weak cards you have. The goal is to give an impression of what strengths you have which are false.

Deception is definitely not the central focus of the game, but it helps. I noticed that someone skilled will typically win 7/10 games vs someone who is a novice.

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 informed opponent, for instance by playing a move that may be less optimal, but is more likely to provoke a response that you know is bad but your opponent does not. At the very highest level this is less and less possible, and it does devolve into more of a computational exercise than a game, but I would argue that the same tactical constriction as skill improves exists in poker as well.

Was going to say this.

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

I tried this question with Dota: "What does Dota teach me about working with a software development team"

The only really big one I came up with is that some people are just toxic and you have to mute them and play around them as best as possible.

Dota taught me a lot.

Especially how to insult people in Russian.

The one thing that always drove me to keep playing when I had more time was the sweet nectar of being part of a high-performing team. When everything clicked together and you knew that you could rely on your teammates during the ebbs and flows across lanes.

I miss those days.

Yes, I switched teams at work to be on a high-performing team. All the high performing people left the team for one reason or another. I still felt like there were interesting problems to solve, but my outlook became rather depressed for a while.

I don't know whether I should have stayed around after the high-performers left.

The next best thing I miss from online team games was training newbies and seeing them perform at a high level (over time). The conversion rate was very low (20-25%), but if I'm being honest that made the reward all the sweeter.

However, I appreciate and understand that work place dynamics are the real world where external factors can play outsized roles and "performance" is often much harder to measure directly.

It's ironic that von Neumann said that poker isn't susceptible to computation while a few decades later, the game theory that he invented was used to create poker bots that are provably (within epsilon) unbeatable.

This is what I thought as well. The article highlights some differences in game structure and how that impacts strategies, but the whole cut off between perfect information and imperfect information seems fetched since in both cases it's humans responding to stimuli and computers being able to do that more effectively. And what I took away from poker in the early '00s was that even bluffing is optimization albeit under uncertainty. Counting the outs etc. to make informed bluffs, not random ones. Well it got me a year of tuition but it was boring as hell playing six screen no fold'em holdem. What was more interesting looking back was the building of databases of hands to spot regular fishes at tables and waiting for a seat there.

I think that's true for 2 player games but not >2 player games?

reference: https://int8.io/counterfactual-regret-minimization-for-poker...

If you like Among Us, you should try Project Winter. Same concept but the game is more sophisticated in a few ways. (1) Everything is done by voice chat, which makes it a lot harder to fib. (2) The tasks and ways to sabotage are also more intricate than Among Us, which in that game are basically "click this button" whereas in Project Winter it involves crafting, going to the corners of the map (which is also a lot bigger) to find pieces, or combat. One of the tasks involves finding four digits across the map, so in that case it's very easy and effective to simply lie about which number you found and cause a lot of wasted time. (3) You can remove/kill anyone from the game but in Project Winter you don't know who was the imposter until the end of the game, so you're never certain how many are left.

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 annotations on more things, maybe it would be a cool AR feature.

What do you use to play?

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.

We use pokerstars.bet which has an option to obtain free tokens and to host a “home” game. You share your “club id” so your friends can register for and join your game. Some friends observe the game without playing. Separately, we join a zoom while playing. $20 buy in and the software allows optional buy-backs for a period.

It scales automatically to number of players so we’ve had multiple tables going at once in a game that collapse down as players are eliminated.

Pokerstars is a beast, it opens a million windows, but I gotta admit, it’s also got a million features - though once it did incorrectly decide the winning hang which left all of us scratching our heads and 1 person very upset.

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.

Have you tried PokerTH? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PokerTH

More detail in other comment below but we use pokerstars.bet.

The advantage of games is that you can combine unbiased evaluation, the opportunity of a short cycle and minimal cost (mostly time).

Most superior mammals are learning by playing for a reason.

> minimal cost

Unless we're talking about poker and you develop a gambling addiction.

Some high stakes pro I can't remember: "Yes, I have a gambling addiction. Fortunately, I'm good at it."

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 "drama".) They're both in the "social deduction" genre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_deduction_game There's an old game called "Mafia" in the same genre. (I guess "Mafia-like" might be a bit ambiguous as the name of a genre.)

It's a highly social game, bordering on party game, which makes it different from most of my library of go-to games. Some of the most fun I've had is knowing I can't talk myself out of a situation, so go out as fun as I can.

"Purp did it. I was right there and saw 'em."

"Me too. We were both in the room and he just killed red."

"Listen. In my defense... I have this knife..."

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.

Another one in this genre is a Garry's Mod gamemode called "Trouble in Terrorist Town", where similarly a minority of the players are traitors and the innocents need to work out who they are before they kill everyone.

Now that human experience and Alpha Go have plotted out the playable variances in the first 40 moves, I still offer you this: you should play blitz chess.

Not being to find the best move leads to sub-optimal play which then offers tactical back-and-forth games. In my live games, I also try to use openings (e.g. Sicilian Najdorf, KIA) that reward sharp playmaking, inviting human error.

"Bluffing" in chess could be interpreted as "gambits": giving up material in exchange for attacking tempo/positional value. The bold bet is that despite your material disadvantage, you can still beat them before the game ends. "Deception" could be feinting a queenside push, only to position your army for a kingside endgame.

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.

Maybe ten years ago I remember playing bluffing games like "Werewolf" and "Mafia" on IRC, where a bot would randomly assign you to be a wolf or resistance and you'd talk it up in the chat.

One Night Ultimate Werewolf capitalized on the "Old Spice Guy" ads and had Isaiah Amir Mustafa narrate in an app to facilitate in-person play.

Among Us is really just a continuation along this series of games -- except you actually have to go around a 2D map and complete toy tasks to accomplish a goal. If you're not into playing games, you can watch some folks on Twitch playing it to get a sense of how the dynamics work.

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

> Chosing insurance-package on the rental car,

FWIW Insurance is a negative expected value "asset", but it makes sense to buy it (not in this case necessarily). A one time massive negative hit to your finances could be devastating compared to periodic insurance payments. Expected value is a simplified representation of the distribution of outcomes which is really what you should be thinking about regarding risk management.

As far as I know, it is not even possible for me to rent a car completely without insurance and thereby risk having to pay for the full value of the car. :)

So it is really about what kind of deductible you will have vs. what you pay for it.

If I save 100 EUR 10 times renting a car and I expect to have one damage costing me 1000 EUR every 10 times I rent a car - it is neutral EV.

If you can't afford the "hit" of a large deductible if an accident happes, then it would make sense to pay more here and now to reduce or eliminate that risk.

I have saved thousands of euros over the years by electing to go with the included insurance, which typically is around 1000-1500EUR deductible, if I remember correctly.

So if I crash my rental car the next three times I rent a car and have to pay 3x1000EUR deductible, I will still be in the green.

Last time I picked an upgraded insurace, it was because we were a group that rented together, and I didn't want to risk friendsships over who might have dented the car etc. :)

I don't mean to defend this particular insurance, just point out that insurance is a negative expected value product (hence why insurance companies exist and are profitable) but it still makes sense to buy it a lot of the time.

You have that concept in poker too. It's called "bankroll management".

Among us is nothing new it’s a rehash of an old Starcraft 1 map mod called “The Thing,”

The idea was you had up to 8 marines and 1 was a zergling, stick together until the timer runs out to win.

Fun times. I miss those days.

Game theory fans may want to try a game invented by John Nash (and others) called So Long Sucker aka F* You Buddy! Gameplay consists of making - and breaking - alliances between players.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_Long_Sucker

Sounds like a possible progenitor to Diplomacy[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(game)

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

Let me plug https://forum.mafiascum.net/ here, if you enjoy long games of mafia/werewolf with too much analysis going on

The funny thing is there are a lot of pro chess players that are really strong poker players not as much the other way around so chess lends to poker guess the author should start with chess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com