Poker Theory and Analytics
ocw.mit.edu
ocw.mit.edu
Basically it boils down to a solid system in limit poker where raises are controlled. One huge raise in a no limit game skews the pot odds so badly that mathematically it almost always means you should fold and that makes no limit a great game for the WSOP.
I like the book "The Mathematics of Poker" by Chen.
I'd like to understand that sentence better. Got any links?
What are other poker books, classes or tutorials that are high quality?
I like most of what he's written, so just to whet some appetites, I'll link to the FToP overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_poker
Once you master the basics, Miller's Poker's 1% (http://www.amazon.com/Pokers-1%25-Secret-Keeps-Players/dp/14...) and Janda's Applications of No Limit Holdem (http://www.amazon.com/Applications-No-Limit-Hold-Matthew-Jan...) explore the game from a game theoretical perspective - interesting if you want to go deeper.
If you are mathematically inclined, Mathematics of Poker by Bill Chen (one of the lecturers in the linked post) is one of best books to get introduced to modern poker theory & math.
TwoPlusTwo is the biggest community but their quality has gone south for many years. Currently the hottest content/community is on http://www.runitonce.com community. Their $10/mo membership delivers serious value for any serious poker enthusiasts.
I'm in the UK, and the government leans on the side of restricting freedom, yet poker-for-money is totally legal here.
It's fine when your young, and single, but I have know families that lost everything, and as I said before; we don't have much of a safety net.
(I haven't traveled much in the U.S., but every town I been in has had legal poker tables. I think poker is legal here?)
I wish people would be able to make educated decisions in regards to their own life. I would not want the state to decide on how I, or others, spent our pastime.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He wants the ABILITY to choose one's own path. He's not commenting (positively or negatively) on the paths others have chosen.
Not quite.
Cash games with rakes and evenly matched players are effectively "stacked against you". Every player at the table will be a loser. Even if you are +ev, a high rake can still make you a loser.
Very large field MTTs are close to lotteries. A good player can not expect to play one hundred 1000 player tournaments and beat variance. Assuming the typical definition of a good player being twice as likely to win, confidently beating variance requires 1000s of tournaments.
Similarly, no game is evenly matched, and there's no particular reason any given player can't elevate their game to the point of beating the rake.
Is there any factual basis? Or historical reason(s) which influences the psyche of the U.S., inducing an irrational response to poker?
Any pleasurable activity from video games, to food, to alcohol, etc. can be done to a destructive end. That doesn't make the activity intrinsically destructive on its own.
There is a well-established correlation between poverty and addiction--don't make the mistake of assuming that just because the correlation applies to a variety of real-world activities it is causal.
Current research is actually leaning in the opposite direction: lower socioeconomic status/poverty has a negative long-term effect on the brain's plasticity & stimulus response which may pre-dispose individuals to addictive tendencies (through altered reward pathways or lessened inhibition re: changes in the pre-frontal cortex).
Please don't make the mistake of trying to impose value judgements on society in the name of "protecting" people -- that line of "reasoning" has led to some really problematic and harmful public policies.
Regardless of how you feel about the activity itself, treating addiction as a neurophysiological state has produced consistently better outcomes. Trying to ban potentially-addictive triggers for at-risk populations isn't really helping them at all, and in a sociological context can actually have the opposite effect.
Ehm, well, yes, and governments ban or discourage destructive and addictive activities all the time.
Also, fighting symptoms isn't great, but if it's all you've got, it's often better than nothing. It's not entirely clear to me how banning gambling could make poor people any poorer.
I don't really have an opinion on whether or not gambling should be illegal, but I just don't find your argument against regulating harmful activities very convincing at all. It's very close to "just look at Stalin, how did that work out?"
In that model there are two essential approaches (aside from negligence) one can take: enforcement or empathy. The former says "it is in the greater good for this to be restricted," without paying much mind to the individual. The latter focuses instead on the individual or condition and says "how can I help this individual transition from a destructive state to a healthy one and/or integrate them into society?"
I think we see the enforcement approach fail when banned activities can't be clearly demonstrated to cause acute harm. It's easy to stand behind a law designed to restrict a deadly substance, reduce drunk driving, et al. -- that gets harder when you start restricting abstract behaviors that don't have graphic or clearly-definable consequences (e.g. a drunk individual behind the wheel of a car is a simple and acute danger; I challenge you to quantify the impact of a generalized, individual "gambler" on society).
Regardless of your own value associations, we as humans are dynamic creatures and "laws" are static values -- that is to say they exist on a spectrum of opposing force that occasionally shifts dramatically in one direction. I think we're seeing that shift now through the lens of the failed "war on drugs," in how innate these behaviors are to our biology. You may feel better banning an activity that you feel is destructive, but you shouldn't be so naive as to assume your ban will have any effect on individual human motivation when dopamine is involved--it's deferring the problem, and distracting from the factors that predispose an individual to "destructive behavior" in the first place.
I do think enforcement is necessary (re: balance, the key to everything in society), but it's hard to argue that the "war on drugs" (as an example) has done anything other than establish a black market global economy, the supply chains of which bring instability and violence to much of South/Central America... not to mention the egregious legal precedents toward non-violent offenders we have set in our own country under the guise of reform and in the interest of subsidizing for-profit prisons.
If we're really interested in improving our quality of life as a society, maybe we shouldn't regulate "activities" so much as how we respond to them in terms of statute and precedent...
You can certainly overcome that edge by being more skilled than your opponents (which is a nice difference from most other casino games), but over the entire population of poker players, playing poker is a losing proposition.
In the eyes of a casino, there is no difference in running a poker game or any other game (except possibly that poker is a pretty expensive game to run, compared to how much you can rake without it being obvious that the rake is significant, as it has fairly slow rounds and few participants per staff needed to run it).
There is a huge difference between playing a game against the house which is mathematically set up to lose you money in the long term, vs. paying an entrance fee to compete against other players.
- In poker, the house takes a cut that typically overwhelms the benefit of being a skilled player. An unskilled player is losing to the house and their competitors.
- An unskilled player may not be playing against random opponents. Part of the skill you are talking about is the skill of picking vulnerable opponents and milking them.
- Gambler's ruin still takes effect: you have a finite bankroll so you can only ride out a finite amount of bad luck before you're bankrupt. Fine, if you're rich or the house.
- Many of the best poker players in the world have bankrupted or have had to take deep loans to continue playing.
That's because it turned out that those players weren't actually the best players in the world. Poker saw a huge birth of statistical analysis from 2002-2008 when Online Poker was legal/legal enough in the US. People who only played live (in person at a casino) their entire career might only play 50k-200k hands. When online poker came about you could play 200k hands in a month. It turns out these so called "best in the world players" were just on a really good run. It also turns out it takes millions upon millions of hands to really find out if you're truly a winner or just benefitting from the good side of variance.
This affect gets even worse because the so-called "Best players in the world" were MTT players and MTTs have the highest statistical variance of all. I have friends who are still poker pros. Next to Asian businessman, the only other player they would rather have at their tables are "Television Pros."
People don't go broke in poker because the rake is too high. They go broke, by and large, because they aren't good enough to beat their opponents. It's still a skill game in the long run.
A lot of poker players (even some great players) move up stakes too quickly. In other words, they play above their bankroll.
Many poker players also have 'off the felt' problems like, ironically enough, losses accrued from gambling on blackjack, craps, etc.
In poker, the house takes a cut that typically
overwhelms the benefit of being a skilled player.
An unskilled player is losing to the house and
their competitors.
Most online game rakes are beatable, plus you get rake back offers, etc.
Gambler's ruin still takes effect: you have a finite
bankroll so you can only ride out a finite amount of
bad luck before you're bankrupt. Fine, if you're rich
or the house.
Many of the best poker players in the world have bankrupted
or have had to take deep loans to continue playing.
Now contrast these points against games like blackjack (which make the casinos way more money than the poker room does) and it's not even remotely the same thing.
I survived for two years playing live poker and I used to be a partner in an underground club in Manhattan. Our rake was inline with what AC offered.
> Bankroll management is part of being a skilled player. If you are playing with a roll suitable for the level you are playing at, 20 buy-ins usually, and still meet ruin then you aren't beating variance then you are a bad player, not just having bad luck.
There's a strong suvivorship bias present here. Most poker pros never busted their 20-roll buy-in--that's probably true. Plenty of very good players had some very bad luck and busted a 20 buy-in 'roll.
Some very smart professionals--leatherass, for instance--recommend 100 buy-in bankrolls.
Even then, if you play long enough (as in many lifetimes in aggregate), you will eventually go bust. So certainly it's happend that otherwise qualified players have blown through 100 buyin 'rolls due in large part to variance.
The best players win all the money. Both skilled and unskilled players realize that.
That said, I'm all for abolishing state-run lotteries. The government simply has no business running a lottery. The profit from these lotteries also stifles the potential for better alternatives such as Prize-Linked Savings plans. Freakonomics has had some decent discussions of these types of accounts.
http://freakonomics.com/2010/12/02/freakonomics-radio-who-co...
"According to a study published in May 2015, players from the USA are banned in more than 72% of the world's online casinos. Having considered multiple factors, such as ISP blocks of online casinos and restrictions for casino financial transactions, the report concluded that as of 2015, the USA is the worst country for online gambling of the 225 studied[1]."
[1]http://www.keytocasino.com/en/article/online-gambling-access...
Is this aimed at those completely new to Poker Theory?