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Comment by bgutierrez | Hacker News Reader

I don't know gte910h's reasons, but I'm also curious to know how many executives are excellent poker players. Poker has elements of chance, betting, and partial-information that make it a great environment for exploring game theory and information theory. Optimal strategies have to have a solid mathematical foundation, but must still be flexible depending on opponent's experience and demeanor. Good players know when to fold and when to bet, even if it hurts to think about the risk. They have to become comfortable losing money occasionally, knowing that if they continue to make good decisions, they'll come out ahead in the long run.

Chess is perfect for a world where we make our decisions with full information in a deterministic environment. For the partially informative, stochastic world that we live in, I'll choose poker.

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You have most of it.

More importantly: You always do X Y and Z in poker (many times), even if you will probably lose the current hand, because X Y and Z are all positive expectation, even if the current result of that particular instance turns out bad. This skill cannot be undersold in real life. It's the key to sales pitches, job interviews, getting raises, running departments, etc. It's the key to fairness to people who did something that got a poor result (but was a good way to do something), etc.

Backgammon sits nicely in-between chess and poker; Players have perfect information, but there is well-defined element of chance in it. Dan Harrington (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Harrington) famously excels in all three games (chess master, champion backgammon player, world champion poker player) suggesting a link in proficiency.

However, Backgammon is really only useful for figuring things out about people who were alive in the 70s, as no one else plays it. It's a VERY boring game without gambling, which is illegal many places (the doubling die doesn't matter really without money).

My brother-in-sin was a professional backgammon player at one point. What he said killed it was the development of a computer program that played perfectly. Prior to that someone would learn to play, and you had a long time to keep profitably exploiting their small flaws as they improved. After the computer program came out they would start to play, learn about the computer program, then fairly shortly after would play as well as you did.

A classic example of efficiency (in this case of learning) can result in decreasing profit opportunities.

You don't play a match in one game. You play five or seven. The doubling cube speeds up play and has a critical impact on the whole game.

There's plenty of online backgammon gambling.

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