Johns Hopkins Poker Course
hopkinspokercourse.com
hopkinspokercourse.com
Lots of deep ideas to explore once you've been introduced to them.
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That sounds a cool story either for a Doccumentary or maybe a webapp to easily manage that on the lower ranks where informality and everyone knowing each other might not be true?
Whether you apply the mathematical insights straight up is another question. But there's no excuse for being sloppy:
'Physical resources, actual human lives' deserve optimal play.
A sentimentality that treats a single photogenic orphan as more important than the plight of many does not cut it.
Yes, that's important. And it's also important to always keep in mind the limitations of your models. (That's constantly on people's mind in finance already, by the way.)
> People who play games tend to have a pretty loose grasp on the real world. Especially people who play games with other people's money.
Citation needed, I guess?
And when anyone points these things out, they complain and deny responsibility. "If I don't someone else will. Why is the government always on my ass trying to interfere?"
This seems like a whole hodgepodge of complaints about some boogeyman?
Eg for what it's worth, I've worked in finance on and off, and I can assure you that most people 'who play money games' do not 'trade in weapons'.
Trading weapons is a fairly specialized niche, and your average stock trader has no clue about that niche, even if they wanted to get into that specific market.
There might be other things wrong with people working in finance. But not all people you don't like engage in all the vices you don't like at the same time.
Btw, I suspect most weapons trading is done to prop up governments, not to undermine them. (Even thought neither you nor me might find the governments in question very sympathetic.)
Don't lose track of the two senses of "game" being used.
The original post only mentioned game theory, and you complained "To operate at the game level of abstraction is sociopathic."
When we speak of the game abstraction in game theory, we are not talking about amusements. The term for the concept comes from the study of amusements, but in the context of game theory, a game is merely a situation where at least two participants make strategic decisions that effect each others' outcomes, potentially in the face of incomplete knowledge.
In this sense, "People who play games" are people who make mutual decisions which affect themselves and others.
Since game theory is a tool that allows you to make better decisions than the intuitive biases would nudge you otherwise, to operate at a game level of abstraction is not sociopathic but a necessity - if physical resources and actual human lives are at stake, abandoning such formal reasoning would be reckless and grossly negligent.
There is a reason trading firms and hedge funds prefer to recruit good poker players. It's because it (i) teaches these concepts at a visceral, muscle-memory level, (ii) it teaches you to apply the concepts while under emotional strain (you may be surprised at the % of statistics professors will crumble totally when they have skin in the game), (iii) it teaches you to merge the concepts together (game theory, stats, etc) in a single cohesive decision-making framework. These are not skills that academic coursework can give you.
Consider an analogy: Is it better to learn programming through merely coursework/textbooks, or by picking up a project where code is required to complete that project?
It's also fun. It's the only reason many people get exposed to these important concepts without ever wanting to study statistics etc formally.
The direct analogies between poker and market making are already way thinner than many people make it out to be though they still exist. But I’d argue poker experience is basically completely useless for quant investing.
Anyhow having played/discussed cards with quite a few trading and research people from SIG I can safely say the poker thing there is more marketing fluff than anything else. Pretty effective marketing though it seems. Which is fine of course, because trading is a completely different game.
Calling it "an excuse to slack off" ignores that different people's motivations are different. If being interested in poker makes someone want to learn the underlying math, then that probably is the most effective way _for them_ to study it.
For example, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
https://www.masterclass.com/classes/daniel-negreanu-teaches-...
is good. There's a lot of modern strategy involved, specifically around playing probability ranges v. trying to place people on particular hands. For someone getting back into poker after a decade or so I thought it was pretty good.
In online short-handed (6 or less) cash poker against the online pros he is the "fish".
Computer poker research group[1] of university of Alberta are working on creating AI that play poker better than human.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190711141343.h....
52!=8*10^67 arrangements.
That's a pessimistic view of the future.
Solo computer games are probably the lowest stake activity you could think of. But some games have 'perma death' and 'iron man' modes. The former means that you or your pawns etc can't come back after being killed off. The latter means that there's only ever a single save file for one playthrough, ie you can save-and-quit to take a break, but you can't load an early save game when something inevitably goes wrong.
This kind of playstyle is common in rogue-like games. But can also be employed for strategy games like X-Com.
Essentially, as long as you have a better hand than most other players at the table, you should have a higher chance of winning.
If you have the weakest hand, the house will play to beat _you_, so it should be better to risk and hit. But if another player has worse hand, the house will play to beat _them_. The house won't risk to go bust if they already beat half of the players, so you don't have to risk a hit if you're in the better half.