Not an expert but my understanding is that it's only feasible on a small enough scale to eke out tiny profits over the long run, too much success will get you rapidly 86'd.
If anyone reading this is intrigued by games of chance with an available skill edge and is considering learning advantage Blackjack, I'd highly recommend learning Poker instead. You're not playing against the house, you're playing against other players, and the house is not incentivized to clamp down on the edges available (though of course they take a cut of everyone's winnings). And it's an endlessly deep strategic game instead of a mechanistic counting game that advantage Blackjack is, which is to say, it's actually fun.
Minimizing your losses is essential; so is maximizing your gains. TBF, in a tournament there is something to be said for biasing towards loss minimization because of the need to preserve your tournament life resulting in chip value being non-linear. But, in cash games (which ironically is what Chamath mostly plays), there is no such bias. Most amateur players arrive incorrectly at that bias over time because frequently miss thin value themselves, and also miss on value when they have the nuts because they don't bluff enough, while also often giving up value incorrectly to better players who are exploiting them, so their experiential bias tells them to err on the side of playing it safe and waiting for a set up in their favor to realize most of their EV, not realizing they are bleeding it away on the margins in countless other spots.
> Democrats, despite winning the popular vote in all but 2 elections since 1988, are pretty much completely out of power
This shit pisses me off so much. Why can't they play by the same rules? The supreme irony is, if Dems were willing to occasionally fight dirty/play to win as well, at least when they still had some power, it would have likely forced Republicans to try to govern well occasionally rather than simply always playing to win.
Incidentally: Chamath plays a fair amount of high stakes poker recreationally, including on various streams and/or filmed poker content. I forget if it was on twitter or a Reddit AMA or what, but he once gave a blurb about what he had learned playing the game for some time, and he said something to the effect of "Poker is a fundamentally defensive game", which is an absurd statement. There is no strategic bias towards offense or defense in poker, there is only EV maximization, which you would think a VC would be able to wrap their head around, but he has managed to fundamentally misunderstand the game.
I'd push back on the idea that gambling is inherently harmful. Gambling can be done at a scale where it is essentially play. It is particularly gambling against corporations or other non-individual actors, in games that they rig to be perpetually -EV, and market like crazy, that is inherently harmful.
I know what I'm talking about - this thread was about someone who admitted to running a BOT online for real money. Like, fully automated no human in the loop. Which again, is just straight up cheating people out of their money. That's wildly different from what Tamayo was doing, which I don't consider cheating either, at least not by the current rules. Though I do think it would be fairer if tournament rules were changed to disallow coaching while the level clock is running but I digress.
Literally nobody respectable in the poker world argues that you should be able farm human opponents with bots, regardless of how close to optimal the bots are programmed to play. Except you, I guess.
It's a wild false equivalency to imply that using GTOw or Pio as a study tool is the same as using them for real time assistance.
And even if bots are imperfect, people and especially recreational players, don't sign up to real money poker sites to play against bots. Everyone knows intuitively they're at a massive disadvantage over a bot that can execute any strategy perfectly ad infinitum, even if the strategy itself is imperfect.
If you're going to be cheating scum, just own up to the fact that you're a bad guy; don't make intellectually dishonest justifications for it.
Yes in the fullest. For one thing it's against the ToS of every site. But it's also just plainly unethical. Even the most elite players are merely reaching a moderately accurate approximation of optimal play, which completely pales in comparison to a bot that can find it on every hand. Of course a bot that simply assumes opponents are playing co-optimal strategies will only be minimally exploitative, but more sophisticated bots can easily incorporate historical data and find correct maximally exploitative deviations against opponents in real time, which again is something that even the best players are only able to do accurately a fraction of the time.
Also it's laughable to suggest that playing optimally is "just the given" in MTTs, which are arguably the softest format available where almost nobody in a given field is playing anywhere close to optimal. And even more laughable to suggest that modern bots are akin to players adhering to SuperSystem, a poker strategy book written nearly 50 years ago which was already extremely outdated before the advent of solvers 10 years ago.
It does, but there is a crucial difference between poker and most of those other forms of gambling, in that it's possible to be a long term winner at poker, as opposed to games that structurally favor the house. So, you have to be dumb to think you can beat slots long term; you merely have to be delusional to think you can beat poker long term.
Yea, it certainly isn't all one or the other, but people are on average quite bad at estimating the precise degree to which we have control over uncertain outcomes, and tend to wildly over or under estimate based on emotions, biases and superstitions.
Yea the "optimal" solution shown by the default input is pretty silly. You're giving everyone 5 chips with which they can post blinds, and they're going to use 3 of them per turn through the blinds, so after 1 turn through the blinds someone who has won no hands will need to make change with someone else. And making change from the next smallest denomination will require 5 of that persons small chips!
Other, less important usability consideration is that you would typically want "round" amounts of chips, ideally stacks of 10 or 20, though having a few big chips in odd amounts is fine. Not as big a deal, but again, very much diverging from typical poker ux expectations.
Neat project technically, but highly impractical for actually playing poker.
edit: to be fair, just saw the advanced options, which would allow it to produce a more useful result, so that's cool. maybe just update the defaults :)
I don't think people are scared about it, it's more of an annoyance. And it's not being wildly exaggerated. In NYC nowadays it's more common than not when walking anywhere to get at least one strong whiff of weed per trip, if not multiple. It's also become quite common for people to light up in subway stations. I'm a former user who's not offended by the smell but still find it a bit annoying, for fear of it clinging to me.
I really can’t conceive of a way in which depression helps humanity survive. Just because we have a trait doesn’t mean it’s adaptive. More likely, it is a dysfunction of a related emotional state with actual utility (pessimism, paranoia, etc), but it is incorrect to say it helps us survive. It’s just not so maladaptive that it outweighs the benefit of the well functioning adaptation, on a population level.
ISPs knew this would happen if Trump lost in '20, they never acted on it's repeal in the first place. We'll almost certainly get to see what the no-neutrality internet really looks like if Trump wins this year...
I agree with this. I this misunderstanding is the root cause of, well a lot of shit, but particularly the increase in belief in conspiracy theories by members of the public. Most people lack a conceptual understanding of emergent behavior in complex systems, and instead rely on linear narrativization to understand the world (which by the way is not an insult to the public's intelligence, it's just the way our brains work unless you make a concerted effort to step outside of that default). And if you aren't considering multivariate, emergent behavior as a possible explanation for unpredictable and inscrutable world events, the next and really only reasonable explanation is intricate conspiracies by powerful agents.
It doesn't have an inherent negative moral connotation when used amongst gamblers. It's been reclaimed, so to speak. But I suppose we're not amongst gamblers here, so, fair enough.
I guess you're getting downvoted because people think you mean HN by "here", but you meant amongst gamblers. And you're right, it is the most apt term gp was looking for.
+1 to this. As a long time cannabis user who is quite skeptical of many of the purported health benefits, this is one I’m not at all skeptical about. It’s actually just the other side of the coin of the degraded short/mid term memory that is a well known downside of habitual cannabis use. But as someone with frequent, vivid nightmares when I’m sober, I can attest that cannabis effectively blocks my ability to remember most dreams - which again is a mixed bag, as I enjoy recalling happy or neutral dream, but when I’m stressed being able to basically opt out of vivid nightmares is a huge boon.
Yea I recognize it's probably been greatly reduced generation over generation, it was already being addressed systematically when I was a kid ~20 years ago... but saying "eliminated" seems like it must be an exaggeration. Though ironically, the bullying that does occur probably has been largely relocated from the physical realm to the digital, so in that sense it may have been all but eliminated.