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From: Ross
Miller
At: 2/22 12:45
This post is inspired by the ongoing efforts of Ed May and
others to illuminate me on the game of poker.
1. Good traders run experiments on the market to paraphrase
Dr. Brett. Such
behavior is a strong precondition to rationality as I used to
say when I
was an academic. What's amazing is that governments and other
bureaucracies
never behave this way. The feds pass laws and regulations on a
grand scale
usually without testing them out first. (Doing a trial run of
something is
rarely a way to test it out, it's a way of killing it while
trying to
convince one constituency or another that one is doing
something about the
problem.)
2. Good poker players run experiments on their opponents.
3. The countist/Sklansky approach to poker is to determine the
value of a
hand by running massive numbers of computer simulations,
usually consistent
with the axioms of game theory. This is not a real experiment,
just as
poker with play money isn't real poker, or surveys aren't real
data. The
simulation approach requires that the holder of a hand behave
in a certain
programmed manner and the opponents react in a certain
programmed manner.
Such exercises can be informative, but they are not worth
putting a lot of
weight on.
4. The typical outcome of the simulation approach to poker is
the creation
of a ranking of hands. A-A (pair of Aces) usually wins and A-K
suited comes
next. There are players that think A-K suited is better than
A-A. Are they
right?
5. Maybe. The thing is that A-A is a harder hand to play
correctly than A-K
suited. Indeed, I would suspect that for most poker players,
pairs,
especially 8-8 through J-J are the hardest hands to play
correctly. Part of
this is because some of the seemingly good hands they easily
make--iffy two
pairs and three-of-a-kinds--can lose in a large variety of
ways. The bulk
of the misplayings of A-A involve not folding the hand
immediately after an
unfavorable flop or later community card, especially with
tight or easily
read opponent(s).
6. Solution: What hands you play should depend not on a table
in a book,
but on how well you play in a given situation. That's why some
players are
big into mediocre suited connectors (8-7 of the same suit, for
example).
They know how to play them better than they can play some
other hands. One
can make big money off of learning how and when to play hands
that the
computer would consider particularly dubious, like 5-3 suited,
a hand that
can do amazing things against A-A. Because it's important to
limit your
losses with such probabilistically poor hands, position and
blind/ante
structure matter even more than they normally do.
7. With suited hands, and remember pairs are never suited,
it's easy to
develop reasonable rules of thumb of how much to spend to see
a flop and
which flops to fold unless a good bluffing opportunity arises.
8. The thing one has to remember in poker that economists and
psychologists
tend to forget is that your subjects have an incentive to
deceive you (and
vice versa).