natecarroll

The players they recruited were incentivized by a $8,000 prize pool up for grabs among the 34 of them...average $EV $235. They have to play 3000 hands to get a shot at that money, which is probably around 10 hours of multitabling. So that's ~$24/hr in expectation.

And then of course you don't get anything unless you're one of the top three winners against the bot, so there's likely nothing to be gained from grinding out a marginal victory. You should just go ahead and play kinda stupid/aggro and hope you win some of the big flips and whatnot. There's literally nothing at stake for you except time value, so you might as well flame out early and then quit or run up a big stake to give yourself a shot at top 3.

Basically, the study design ensures the bot faces off against weak players playing in a way that would be sub-optimal in any other situation. Not surprised the bot won by a decent margin, nor that they are trying to spin this real hard in advance of the CMU poker bot matchup next week, which will be much more rigorous.

The notion of statistical significance as applied to research papers doesn't map well to the poker domain. He keeps repeating that they won 9 big blinds per hundred hands over an 80k sample because anyone familiar with poker at all knows that's an absolute spanking.

Does that mean no-limit poker is volatile enough that results considered by insiders to be long-term don't achieve 95% confidence? Idk probably, I haven't looked at the math myself. Is 73 buy-ins over 80k hands a huge win? No doubt.

I just read a great book called Paradise Now about 5 different Utopian movements in the US, Oneida being one of them. It seems the most successful colonies blended business savvy with a coherent set of values and cultivated familial closeness. Capitalist individualism obviously dominated the 20th century, but I can imagine a tech-focused system of common ownership making a comeback.

https://www.amazon.com/Paradise-Now-Story-American-Utopianis...

Turns out that ignoring all political, legal, and economic frictions makes solving all the world's problems very easy! Why don't we all just produce enough food and then give it to the people that are hungry? Duh...!

I've seen several other journalists/bloggers/media-people react to this news as if Andrew's decision was clearly driven by structural economic factors rather than a more benign desire to step away from blogging as his primary form of writing. Ben Smith--of, yes, Buzzfeed--seemed to interpret this as the death knell of independent internet commentary.

What's going on here? I think we can agree we're all sad Andrew Sullivan is quitting The Dish, but are we symbolically sad over what that blog represented which will now never exist again, or are we just sad that a pretty great blogger won't be blogging any more?

hey, what was your screenname on pokerstars/ftp/2+2? from the timeline, i'm guessing we played together a lot.

What's so impressive to me about Red Bull is that they've successfully established a tier of beverages seen as more premium than soda in spite of no particular cost differences. Caffeine is not expensive, but Red Bull gets away with pricing their drinks at 3x what a Coke costs.

Not sure why you are conflating credentialism and vocational training; a big part of the problem is that these two are very different things. That is, students invest 4 years and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and end up with a piece of paper that can get them in the door, but no useful skills.