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Geeks Playing Poker?
Ben Collins writes "I recently won a satellite tournament at Full Tilt Poker for entry into the World Poker Tour Final at Foxwoods Casino. I picked up poker as a hobby about 4 months ago, and consider myself a decent player, maybe due to programming experience (analytical thinking). Any other programmers/computer people find that they can play poker better than the average person because of their computer experience?"
I took up poker a couple years ago before it became popular online, and now I play from time to time online, and I would consider myself a winning player.
The thing with poker is the game isn't all too complicated if we are talking about online play, where sound betting strategy will win you money. Give a logical thinking person a simple poker strategy to play, they will do fine and definetly win some money online.
Online poker is all about logic and patience, and at least the former is found in most computer people, which is why I am guessing they will do much better at the strategic part, which will more or less translate into playing winning poker.
Don't forget Bill Gates was a notorious poker player in college, writing thousand dollar checks at the end of the night usually.
I play a lot of online poker (about 10-12 hours a week) and consider to myself to be a good player, regularly winning $30 tournaments and even have a couple of multi table wins under my belt.
I go out to the Grovesner Casino in Great Yarmouth (England) a few times occasionally and have won the tournaments there simply by playing out the odds, and always starring at my chips, not playing with them at all, and just doing everything like a robot, thus giving away hopefully no tells! Perhaps I would have less success at a major tournament but certainly on a social level those odds calculating and keeping a steady game and not going on a "tilt" can definately make you win.
Its a game for mugs though
I've been playing poker since I was proably 5 or 6 years old. Growing up , when we visited my grandparents' house my dad, my grandfather and my uncle always played poker in another room while my mom helped my grandmother in the kitchen. I bothered them until they let me play, but their condition was that I had to put up my own money. Betting your allowance against a bunch of guys who really would take it and not feel sorry for you makes you think pretty seriously about strategy, odds and winning.
avi freedman, chief network scientist at akamai and all around cool cool guy and networking geek, made it to the final table of pot limit omaha at the world series of poker.
I don't think that being a programmer automatically makes you more apt at poker, since playing good poker is just as much about reading players as it is about calculating odds. BUT...
I know of at least 2 exceptional professional poker players with extensive computer background: Chris "Jesus" Ferguson has a PhD in computer science, and you'll often hear him talking about how his studies in game theory have helped him at the poker table (and I'm thinking he's right, since he won the WSOP main event in 2000). Also, Barry Greenstein (he's also got 2 WSOP bracelets, iirc - neither were main event wins) is a former programmer who worked for Symantec for about 12 years through the mid-90's. As a side note, he donates every penny of his tournament winnings to charity (and I've seen him win over $1 million at a WPT event).
I've been playing poker for about 6 months now (pretty seriously, been competing in tournaments and reading some of the classic poker books), and I consider myself to be fairly accomplished (poker paid for my neuros audio computer, so I must be somewhat OK), and I'd have to say that being a programmer has helped a great deal with getting better.
As I said, being a good poker player has just as much to do with being able to understand your opponent as it does with being able to count outs and figure oods on the spot. If you can get a dead read on the guy you're in the pot with, you're in better shape than if you've got 24 outs post flop because if you know what he's holding, there's no stopping you.
well, it's nothing one behind the ear wouldn't cure
Not so much about poker, but Brining Down the House is a neat read about how some MIT students (definition of geek, no?) took Vegas casinos and other for millions playing blackjack.
Finger (johnc@idsoftware.com) entry from 1998:
2/8/98
------
Just got back from the Q2 wrap party in vegas that Activision threw for us.
Having a reasonable grounding in statistics and probability and no belief in luck, fate, karma, or god(s), the only casino game that interests me
is blackjack.
Playing blackjack properly is a test of personal discipline. It takes a small amount of skill to know the right plays and count the cards, but the
hard part is making yourself consistantly behave like a robot, rather than succumbing to your "gut instincts".
I play a basic high/low count, but I scale my bets widely -- up to 20 to 1 in some cases. Its not like I'm trying to make a living at it, so the
chance of getting kicked out doesn't bother me too much.
I won $20,000 at the tables, which I am donating to the Free Software Foundation. I have been meaning to do something for the FSF for a long
time. Quake was deployed on a dos port of FSF software, and both DOOM and Quake were developed on NEXTSTEP, which uses many FSF based tools. I don't subscribe to all the FSF dogma, but I have clearly benefited from their efforts.
One of the members of that MIT blackjack team (Semyon Dukach) is now running BlackJackScience.com.
Being intelligent does give you a large advantage in poker when it comes to determining probabilities. The ability to calculate quickly how many outs you have as well as other factors like pot odds and implied odds is extremely useful. Also, it should provide some hedge against going on tilt although this happens to any player one time or another regardless of what they might say.
:) Also, most people think it's a pretty cool job and like to talk to you about it...
That said, online poker is much more mechanical than live poker and the advantages for the analytical mind are stronger online by a significant amount. In live play it is much more about profiling people, sensing weakness, and so on then actually what cards you are holding. Online play for any good player is a strictly "by the numbers" you only have to profile particularly bad (or rarely, particularly good) players.
One rather large caveat, being smart/analytical is great but it will not save you against an extremely experienced player. Of course, the ideal is to be both intelligent and experienced, then you are nearly unstoppable (in the long term of course, short term anything can happen).
Myself and the majority of my friends play poker professionally, some extremely successfully but all make a good living. Note that all of us have college degrees but have not bothered to us them yet.
All it takes to be successful is three things:
1) Money
This is a no brainer you have to have enough money so that you can lose for a significant amount of time without busting your bankroll. It is helpful to have other friends who play and can lend you money if things go bad. To make a good living I'd recommend playing 2-3 tables of 15-30 around 30 hours a week online, for this you'll need about $10,000 to be safe. A good 15-30 player that plays full time, 3-4 tables should be able to make around $60,000 a year or more depending. Typically though an excellent player will move to higher limits when they start making this amount of money.
2) Theory
Books, books, books. Of course the "Bible" for Hold 'Em is Sklansky and Malmuth's Hold 'Em Poker for Advanced Players. There are a lot of others but this is the best to start with in my opinion. In addition, if you know someone who is already a professional theory knowledge can be gained by simply watching them play and asking them questions.
3) Experience
Don't need to say much here. A professional playing for 5 years will school you 60+% of the time if you've only been playing for a year. The more the better. Note that the "play money" games do not count as experience nor does limits below 5-10/10-20 really prepare you for a 15-30 or 30-60.
As an aside, tournament play can definitely get you experience but don't count on it improving your play dramatically in standard games, with the exception of profiling and reading people. Not only are tournaments typically no limit but they have a much different dynamic in general. There are many good tournament players who suck at ring games and vice versa.
Anyways, the best thing about being a poker player is the total freedom, you can work whenever you want, or not work for a week if you don't feel like it. If you feel like taking a vacation you can just go, of course sometimes you do have to go to places like Aruba and play tournaments, what a drag!
I highly recommend it but be warned you WILL lose money at first, and you WILL be incredibly stressed out much of the time. Playing is inherently stressful, especially when you hit a dry spell where you lose for a week or two straight. Make sure if this happens, to stay calm, playing looser will not get your money back quicker!
I played in a regular Hold 'Em game several years ago, before the recent popularity boom. A few months, I started getting back into the game, playing online and checking out some of the tournament play on cable TV. Pop culture has ruined the game.
The first sign was my 13 and 15 year-old cousins giving me playing tips at a low limit game at their aunt's wedding. These kids look up to poker "stars" with the same intensity they looked up to Derek Jeter a couple of years ago. Weird. (Their mother didn't seem to mind too much when I schooled them for about $20 total, by the way.)
The second sign was when I went to my first "real" game in several years. Many of the doofuses in attendance had donned "crazy" sunglasses--just like the "stars" on ESPN wear. Other guys had developed their own nervous habits of shuffling their cards, shuffling their chips, etc. So many of the iconic expressions of poker have now been popularized and I think it sucks. It reminds me of when the Red Hot Chili Peppers made it big in the early 1990s, and al of the sudden, all the jocks in high school were wearing Mother's Milk shirts.
I am by no means a pro poker player. I'm not even a good poker player. But damn if I don't hate to see the ghetto of poker being gentrified by a bunch of baseball-cap-wearing, Ray-Ban mofos from the 'burbs.