Training your kids how to lie convincingly to you -- what could go wrong?
> As a parent, I’m pleased that I’ve given her the tools to put herself through college hustling poker games, and then go work at a proprietary trading firm.
which is presumably written with the same sardonic intent as any other Matt Levine work.
Werewolf isn't like poker where people typically try to conceal their emotions and leak nothing; instead you're trying to act like you're on the Villager team regardless of whether you actually are.
Maybe a mafia style game would be more suitable where both sides are played.
You can bet with a bad hand, but you don't need to say you have a good hand, if asked you can say you either have a bad hand or a good hand, without any impact to your strategy.
Lying holds no advantage in poker, you can easily play poker without lying, no correlation is intrinsic to the game or its rules, it's just a common association people make
Instead of thinking of a bet as saying "I have good cards" think of it instead as "I have an advantage in this pot", which is not a lie.
In poker advantages can come from cards, or from other objective measures such as position, stack size. And of course from subjective measures like being able to read your opponent.
Just because other people may try to lie to you, does not mean that you need to lie in order to succeed.
No one said "lying can't be used at all"
Deceiving my opponent has the connotation of this happening in one instance. After you realize that you can't convincingly deceive your opponents in poker into perpetuity, it becomes a game of managing your image —revealing the right information while being conscious of information that you shared in the past (if you're playing someone skilled or perceptive, that is).
On the flip side, what an excellent game to help people pay attention to signals, figure out how to weigh them appropriately, and appropriately act on them when the situation calls for it.
The claim is not that deception can be used as a strategy at all. That btw is actually an uninteresting claim. In almost all games, you can lie to your opponent and probably gain some advantage.
If I were coaching a beginner poker player, I would honestly tell them to play statistically sound poker. That's a good way to make a lot of money.
The first is mostly inconsequential in poker, you should avoid having tells in your posture and speak, but the goal is to avoid conveying information about your hand, not conveying false information about it to deceive.
The second is just the game itself, acting as if you had strong cards has a cost, and is not lying, when you bet you are not saying "I have a hand". In a sense you may bet with a bad hand, but you are more forcing your opponent to pay for a chance to win the pot on account of your hand potentially containing a strong hand. You are truthful in your representation of a potential strong card.
In fact if you were to bluff on a situation were you could not ever have held a strong hand, it would be a mistake, and you would stand to lose expected value.
How about "behaving in a way that increases the probability of your particular adversaries making incorrect inferences about your situation"?
Is that better or worse than calling it deception?
I'd call that lying with extra steps.
(Which to be clear, im fine with in the context of a game (and in certain contexts even in real life). Plenty of sports can be traced back to ritualized ways of practising to murder people. Take all the field sports of track and field)
Maybe you can argue steganography is lying.
Regardless, i also find the idea that lying is morally wrong reductive. Morality depends on context. There are plenty of cases where being misleading is morally ok in my opinion.
If we assume a default state of avoiding engagement, the average poker player is giving away more information that could lead to correct inferences by playing than bad information by bluffing. Exactly at which point does the lie happen?
Because you treated cryptography as a field in its entirety. I think in practise that is how cryptography as a field works normally. Most secret messages communicated with crypto simply wouldn't be communicated (or just communicated in person) without the availibility of cryptography.
Even if the alternative is communicating in a way open to evesdropping i think there is still an intent requirement.
> Exactly at which point does the lie happen?
When there is intentionality to mislead (including by omission).
If you want to be really nitpicky, the definition i would give would be:
Taking (or failing to take) some action for the purpose of causing an adversary to have incorrect or incomplete beliefs that benefit you.
You never got away with anything as a teenager?
Bluffing and detecting bluffing is a useful skill as long as used morally. Sort of like learning martial arts - just because we teach kids karate doesn't mean we want them to go around beating people up.
Gambling however can very easily ruin lives and be very adicting.
At that point, the table awareness of the bluff is still profitable because it forces others to bet into your strong hands.
A bluff that is revealed is just as good as one kept secret. Many people seem to misunderstand this.
Is that a thing... in English? Or in some specific part of the world?
Lying would be trying to introduce a negative correlation between hand strength and bet size; bluffing is merely removing some of the positive correlation that exists.