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Geeks and Poker?
Best ID Ever! asks: "Poker, a fascinating intersection of math, game theory, and observation of human behavior, is currently exploding in popularity due to televised high-stakes tournaments such as the World Poker Tour and Binion's 2003 World Series of Poker. Many of today's top professional players have nerdly roots such as Mathematicians, chess prodigies, or backgammon champions. A few pros, including 2000 champion Chris Ferguson, even used to play poker in the IRC poker community. This year's World Series final event, which began Saturday and lasts through the week, drew 2600 participants, more than three times the number of participants in 2003. How many Slashdot readers play poker, and what do you think of Poker's upswing?"
Poker, Blackjack or other such games are the only sort of gambling I would be remotely willing to participate in because it involves much more than straight chance as involved in slots, roulette or craps. Sure statistics come into play, but nothing forces the stats to hold consistently.
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
Some wise poker advise: "If you don't know who's the sucker at the table, it's you."
While an interesting read (I own the book and have read it several times), it's more about the social engineering aspect of going against the casinos than the actual mathmatics and statistics aspects of card counting. For instance, the MIT team had to resort to (legal) aliases and disguises to avoid being kicked out of Vegas casinos. The trick was not card counting per se, but card counting without the house knowing about it.
:) Poker Nation (forgot the author, sorry) is a much more interesting look into the world of competitive poker players.
also, Bringing Down The House was about blackjack, not poker
NO CARRIER
First try at this ignored paragraph breaks. Sorry!
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I used to play quite a bit of structured-bet poker in the California card rooms. In California, as opposed to Nevada, the card rooms are smoke free, and the competition is *usually* pretty weak.
At tables up to about the 6-12 or sometimes 10-20 range, almost all deals will see a flop. A lot of people will play any pair, regardless of position, and will often play any face card. In Vegas, more people know what they're doing, and a lot of times the deal will be folded around to the blinds.
So, in my opinion, California is about as accomodating a place to play as there is, and I got to a point where I could consistently win about $15/hr, over the long run. Not great, but not bad. More practice and higher table limits probably would have improved this number.
The problem is that it just gets SO. INCREDIBLY. BORING. If you're playing well, you're going to be folding most of your initial hands because they're just not worth playing. There have been hours where I've sat there and folded all 35 hands that are dealt. For a while you can watch the other players and learn their styles, but when you realize that two guys at the table will play anything to the flop, including 2-7 offsuit, there's not a whole lot else you need to know except that those two people suck and you should be ready to exploit their weakness.
Some poker books have stories about men who cut the pockets out of their pants, so they can masturbate at the tables. Perhaps my boredom threshold for masturbating in public is higher, or maybe I just didn't stick with poker long enough, but my decision was that that lifestyle wasn't really the way I wanted to spend my life.
For $15/hr, there are a lot of other jobs that don't revolve around being bored and taking other people's rent money. (Yes, I know you shouldn't play with rent money. A lot of people do. And those are usually the players who suck, and who are losing their money to you.)
Pot-limit and no-limit are completely different animals, but the risk in those games is enormous. It's trivially easy to lose your entire bankroll in one night.
Todd
The only way to win consistanty is to play rationally (ie. mathematically) against people who are not playing rationally.
This is misleading. In order to beat people who are playing "irrationally", you must also play "irrationally". Let me explain what I mean by this.
There is no "Optimal strategy" in poker. There is a good strategy for a specific situation against specific players, but there is no single strategy that can always be applied.
If you always play "rationally (mathematically)", then that means you are not varying your game; then your opponents can read you like an open book. Then they can bluff at you when you check, because "rationally", you check when you have nothing. So this isn't a good way to do it.
When players start out, they usually play "rationally", i.e. they are always thinking about math and odds. The truth is that you have to vary your plays, sometimes doing "irrational" things like betting when you don't have a hand or have an incomplete hand. The reason i call this irrational is that, a rational opponent could turn around and exploit your sub-optimal play. However, you play sub-optimally precisely because you know your opponent is weak and will not exploit your play.
I'll use an analogy to explain this phenomenon. In a game of paper-rock-scissors, the mathematically optimal (rational) strategy is to play randomly. And your analysis of random vs random is correct.. no one wins. However, if your opponent plays "irrationally" (exhibits patterns), then you must also play "sub-optimally" to exploit these patterns. In doing so you will exhibit patterns of your own. If your opponent is playing 66% rocks, you would do well to play lots of papers. Now, if your opponent is rational, he would just start playing scissor instead. But precisely because he continues to play suboptimally (66% rocks), you continue playing papers. Poker is a more complex game, which is why people actually make mistakes of this magnitude at poker and why people don't play paper-rock-scissors for money.
The reason you can win at poker is that players are always betting the value of the cards in their hand. To win at poker, you have to take into account more than your cards and the odds of the next card hitting; you have to bet your position at the table, and you have to bet based on the other player's cards. Bad players will tell you what they have with the size of their bets. Now that you have more information than they do, you can eat them alive.
Newbies around the table hold bullshit-crap
Someone is going to get two pair out of the board. You have to hope for another ace or a pair on the board. If that pair does show up, it likely gives trip-bullshit to one of the 7 implacable newbs.
Your question does not have a short answer. AA is not as good as you think. If all 9 of your opponents stayed in til the river card, it would only win 30% of the time! Granted, your odds before the flop are better than anyone elses, but this means that there are on average seven people sitting at the table that would beat you if they stayed in.
You shouldn't think of yourself as entitled to win that hand, you should try to maximize your value when you win it.
In a tournament setting, going all in with AA pre flop can be a pretty good move, but it's not always how you should play it. Just make a big raise to try to get some people out, and if you have a big re-raiser, then consider going all in.
Having a few punters call your big bet is not a bad thing. It means that the times you do win the hand, you will win more money on average as a result.
Of course, it's not that simple in a tournament, because you also must take your relative stack size into account. If there are still 2500 people in the tournament, someone has a stack ten times your size at the table, you might want to think twice about pushing your advantage too hard. You should almost never fold AA pre flop (though there are very very very rare situations where it is a good idea), but AA is only an 87% winner against a random hand.
Your goal in a proportional payout (pays out to x place, as opposed to a winner-take-all) tournament is to survive as long as possible, NOT to press every little advantage to the limit. This means that, while you must be aggressive, you don't want to risk all your chips early on if you can help it.
In some tournaments (particularly online), you could probably outlast half the field just by folding every hand. Realize this, and take some risks, but try skate your way to the final table, not bludgeon your way there.
In a winner take all tournament, the gloves are off, and you *should* play every little edge to the maximum. This means that you will lose early a lot, but also that you will win more often than you should.
WWJD? JWRTFA!