This post is almost 100% wrong. Collusion isn't as lucrative as you make it out to be. It's also much easier to detect than you imply. Finally, it's harder to do well than most people think, especially the dorks who spend their time doing it. Note that for three players to gain from collusion they will have to make more than three times as much as they each would individually.
RL poker has a lot less to do with reads than you suggest. It is, however, exactly that belief that makes it so profitable, as many many players simply don't understand the maths behind the game, or even the fact that the maths is the most important aspect of it.
And finally, money laundering through poker sites is costly, slow, not accepted by the tax authorities and easy to detect. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it's not happening on a big scale simply because the scale offered isn't big enough for any serious money laundering.
Say you have a slight edge over each opponent, and in total you have a 2/R chance of winning a hand. Now you have 2X-Y and have a net profit of X-Y.
Just for the record: the trick in poker isn't to win more pots, but rather to win bigger pots, and losing less on the pots you don't win. The thing is that not all pots are the same size. This makes the maths a bit more complicated. This complication is the main reason there is such a thing as poker skill.
Actually, in most places the waitresses pay for the drinks themselves, so if you tip that little, they make no money at all. (I do assume that they pay less for the drinks than "full retail", though, but I don't really know exactly how much they do pay.
Me, I'm wondering how many girls born in 80s Scotland were named Margaret.
Ask and ye shall receive: not many, as can be seen here.
The same is true for almost all names that were popular when Ms Thatcher was born. Of the ten most popular girls' names in 1900, only Elizabeth and Catherine remained in the top 100 in 2000. Names are extremely fashion driven, and popular or unpopular politicians have very little impact either way. Also, girl names vary more. Nine of the top 10 boys' names in 1900 were top 100 in 2000, and James and Andrew were still in the top 10.
How can you be sure, if you are trusting a fund manager to do it for you, that they aren't using said programs? Everyone does.
If you are actually paying people to actively manage a broad mutual fund, you are not smart, so your scenario still doesn't make any sense. Ever heard of index funds? How much selling did these funds do?
I'd argue that people who invest in "actively managed" funds deserve to lose money.
When computers are doing things for us that we can't predict or stop, that have an effect on our lives, we are reaching a point of unpredictability.
I agree in general. However, I fail to see how this particular incident applies. It had very close to zero effect on my life. Some stock dropped sharply, then recovered? Happens all the time (although only very infrequently this quickly). So? Explain the effect this has on ordinary people's lives. My definition of "ordinary" is, in this context, "non-day traders".
Bad analogy. A programmer can't be compared to a driver. Instead a user should be compared to a driver. And a user of stock exchange software usually can't bring the entire system down. (I say "usually", as I don't know what caused this particular incident. I have worked at a major stock exchange. They had 99.99% uptime requirements, and when that system went down, it was not user fault.)
You assume that the game is played for your entire bankroll. That is not the best of ideas, and generally not something even the most compulsive gambler is likely to do.
Technically, NL and PL also has a finite number of cases. This is especially true if the game is not very deep stacked. And even a full table limit game has too many nodes for complete enumeration to be a feasonable apporach to deciding your actions.
Well the mathematically correct play is not necessarily the one you want to make. That's where the psychology of the game comes in
The first part is maybe correct. The second part is wrong. This is very simple game theory where it is supremely easy to prove that a mixed strategy is optimal. Calculating the exact details of said mixed strategy is of course supremely hard, which is what makes poker interesting. That and the fact that dummies like to part with their money...
I don't think you understand the economics of poker. The house takes a rake from (almost) every hand. There is no risk for them in any way. Their only risk is alienating the players.
How much extra would they stand to gain by cheating in a non-obvious manner? What would be the risk of detection? How much would they lose if it was indeed detected? Please do the maths here, and then you will reconsider.
That said, there can of course be bad shuffling algorithms that are exploitable. This has happened. There could also be rogue employees cheating. This has also happened. But general cheating from a reputable poker site? Nope, does not happen.
It's not terribly difficult to decide which cards should come out of the deck next, doing so would mean that you easily made millions of dollars a month, yet you choose to not do so. How come, if I may ask? or could it be that you really don't know what you are talking about?
You may or may not trust the poker sites, but it is indeed terribly difficult to decide which cards come next. Yes, there has been exceptions - Poker Planet for one. This is a billion dollar industry. Don't you perhaps think they learnt from that fiasco?
Pot Limit would be more difficult to program than Limit, and No Limit more difficult still.
This may be true, but if it is, it's far from obvious. Theoretical example: you are on the turn with a 55% chance of winning the hand. When the river comes you won't know if you have your opponent beaten or not, but he will know if he has you beaten. Would you rather be in this situation in no-limit or pot-limit play? In NL, you push and gain an unexploitable edge. In PL, if you bet the pot, get called, and opponent bets the pot on the river you are in a very, very uncomfortable position.
From a programming POV, limit is harder than it looks and NL is simpler. (NB: simpler than it looks, not necessarily simpler than limit.)
Sounds like a gambling problem to me. Do you know for a fact that this player played in the same way and in the same games all the time? I'm willing to bet a reasonable amount that this particular player was pretty prone to tilting and/or gambling in general.
This is incorrect. Optimal play, in the mathematical sense, is independent of player profiling.
It is, however, correct that "optimal play" in the sense of beating one particular opponent by the highest possible amount of money, does require player profiling or some other means of exploiting that player's particular weaknesses. And in practice, poker isn't played in order to win narrowly against the best players. It is played in order to extract the most amount of money possible from the worst player or players at the table. If that means losing some small amount to some other players at the table, that is fine.
In actual play at real places (live or on-line), the rake is almost always too high to make a mathematically optimal strategy interesting or worthwhile. From an AI perspective, however, it is interesting.
Finally, computers can beat humans at chess even without player profiling. And if that isn't true today, it will be true in x years' time, for some not too large value of x, because of Moore's law and the general advance in search algorithms.
You know, there are a lot of poker players who would be very very happy to have a strategy that "(ensures) that their EV doesn't fall below zero." If that is a worst-case scenario, as you suggest, we can, by definition, confirm that the computer strategy is winning.
This assumes that the short term economic costs are small (in comparison), and that the effects will be enough to offset the costs. As others, notably those who have counted on this, will tell you, the short term costs are HUGE, and the long term effects from those costs are embarrasingly and unfortunately small. You make the exact same mistake Pascal did in his wager: how do you assign a probability that the religion you chose to go for is in fact the one God happened to have? If you fail there, the wager doesn't look so good anymore.
But I am at least happy to see that we will gain a new capitol out of this.
I hate having to figure out who said what in which e-mail when I'm at work (using Outlook).
Whatever happened to quoting and proper mail etiquette, anyway? When I started using message boards in the early '80s, almost everyone quickly learned to quote properly, to cut out the unnecessary stuff and so on. Now it seems to be a completely lost art. I have had people at work ask me, in all seriousness, why I didn't top post and what those strange ">" characters meant.
I agree that threading is important now, but it is (IMNSHO) a technological solution to a social problem. I find hat unfortunate.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are being chased by Oregon State Police and manage to drive all across Washington and into Canada, I think you deserve to get away.
RL poker has a lot less to do with reads than you suggest. It is, however, exactly that belief that makes it so profitable, as many many players simply don't understand the maths behind the game, or even the fact that the maths is the most important aspect of it.
And finally, money laundering through poker sites is costly, slow, not accepted by the tax authorities and easy to detect. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it's not happening on a big scale simply because the scale offered isn't big enough for any serious money laundering.
Just for the record: the trick in poker isn't to win more pots, but rather to win bigger pots, and losing less on the pots you don't win. The thing is that not all pots are the same size. This makes the maths a bit more complicated. This complication is the main reason there is such a thing as poker skill.
Actually, in most places the waitresses pay for the drinks themselves, so if you tip that little, they make no money at all. (I do assume that they pay less for the drinks than "full retail", though, but I don't really know exactly how much they do pay.
You may want to learn more about the concept called Secondary Market Offering.
Ask and ye shall receive: not many, as can be seen here.
The same is true for almost all names that were popular when Ms Thatcher was born. Of the ten most popular girls' names in 1900, only Elizabeth and Catherine remained in the top 100 in 2000. Names are extremely fashion driven, and popular or unpopular politicians have very little impact either way. Also, girl names vary more. Nine of the top 10 boys' names in 1900 were top 100 in 2000, and James and Andrew were still in the top 10.
If you are actually paying people to actively manage a broad mutual fund, you are not smart, so your scenario still doesn't make any sense. Ever heard of index funds? How much selling did these funds do?
I'd argue that people who invest in "actively managed" funds deserve to lose money.
I agree in general. However, I fail to see how this particular incident applies. It had very close to zero effect on my life. Some stock dropped sharply, then recovered? Happens all the time (although only very infrequently this quickly). So? Explain the effect this has on ordinary people's lives. My definition of "ordinary" is, in this context, "non-day traders".
Bad analogy. A programmer can't be compared to a driver. Instead a user should be compared to a driver. And a user of stock exchange software usually can't bring the entire system down. (I say "usually", as I don't know what caused this particular incident. I have worked at a major stock exchange. They had 99.99% uptime requirements, and when that system went down, it was not user fault.)
Russel? Try Peano.
You assume that the game is played for your entire bankroll. That is not the best of ideas, and generally not something even the most compulsive gambler is likely to do.
Technically, NL and PL also has a finite number of cases. This is especially true if the game is not very deep stacked. And even a full table limit game has too many nodes for complete enumeration to be a feasonable apporach to deciding your actions.
Well the mathematically correct play is not necessarily the one you want to make. That's where the psychology of the game comes in
The first part is maybe correct. The second part is wrong. This is very simple game theory where it is supremely easy to prove that a mixed strategy is optimal. Calculating the exact details of said mixed strategy is of course supremely hard, which is what makes poker interesting. That and the fact that dummies like to part with their money...
I don't think you understand the economics of poker. The house takes a rake from (almost) every hand. There is no risk for them in any way. Their only risk is alienating the players.
How much extra would they stand to gain by cheating in a non-obvious manner? What would be the risk of detection? How much would they lose if it was indeed detected? Please do the maths here, and then you will reconsider.
That said, there can of course be bad shuffling algorithms that are exploitable. This has happened. There could also be rogue employees cheating. This has also happened. But general cheating from a reputable poker site? Nope, does not happen.
It's not terribly difficult to decide which cards should come out of the deck next, doing so would mean that you easily made millions of dollars a month, yet you choose to not do so. How come, if I may ask? or could it be that you really don't know what you are talking about?
You may or may not trust the poker sites, but it is indeed terribly difficult to decide which cards come next. Yes, there has been exceptions - Poker Planet for one. This is a billion dollar industry. Don't you perhaps think they learnt from that fiasco?
Pot Limit would be more difficult to program than Limit, and No Limit more difficult still.
This may be true, but if it is, it's far from obvious. Theoretical example: you are on the turn with a 55% chance of winning the hand. When the river comes you won't know if you have your opponent beaten or not, but he will know if he has you beaten. Would you rather be in this situation in no-limit or pot-limit play? In NL, you push and gain an unexploitable edge. In PL, if you bet the pot, get called, and opponent bets the pot on the river you are in a very, very uncomfortable position.
From a programming POV, limit is harder than it looks and NL is simpler. (NB: simpler than it looks, not necessarily simpler than limit.)
Sounds like a gambling problem to me. Do you know for a fact that this player played in the same way and in the same games all the time? I'm willing to bet a reasonable amount that this particular player was pretty prone to tilting and/or gambling in general.
This is incorrect. Optimal play, in the mathematical sense, is independent of player profiling.
It is, however, correct that "optimal play" in the sense of beating one particular opponent by the highest possible amount of money, does require player profiling or some other means of exploiting that player's particular weaknesses. And in practice, poker isn't played in order to win narrowly against the best players. It is played in order to extract the most amount of money possible from the worst player or players at the table. If that means losing some small amount to some other players at the table, that is fine.
In actual play at real places (live or on-line), the rake is almost always too high to make a mathematically optimal strategy interesting or worthwhile. From an AI perspective, however, it is interesting.
Finally, computers can beat humans at chess even without player profiling. And if that isn't true today, it will be true in x years' time, for some not too large value of x, because of Moore's law and the general advance in search algorithms.
You know, there are a lot of poker players who would be very very happy to have a strategy that "(ensures) that their EV doesn't fall below zero." If that is a worst-case scenario, as you suggest, we can, by definition, confirm that the computer strategy is winning.
Bingo!
Get glasses, mod parent up, close discussion, let's not have it in another quarter year. It really is that simple.
There is exactly zero (0) chance the social democrats will remove this law. After all, it was their idea from the beginning.
"A few weeks of reading"? You have got to be kidding us! This is the internet, we can't be bothered with reading for a few minutes!
And they really are.
This assumes that the short term economic costs are small (in comparison), and that the effects will be enough to offset the costs. As others, notably those who have counted on this, will tell you, the short term costs are HUGE, and the long term effects from those costs are embarrasingly and unfortunately small. You make the exact same mistake Pascal did in his wager: how do you assign a probability that the religion you chose to go for is in fact the one God happened to have? If you fail there, the wager doesn't look so good anymore.
But I am at least happy to see that we will gain a new capitol out of this.
Whatever happened to quoting and proper mail etiquette, anyway? When I started using message boards in the early '80s, almost everyone quickly learned to quote properly, to cut out the unnecessary stuff and so on. Now it seems to be a completely lost art. I have had people at work ask me, in all seriousness, why I didn't top post and what those strange ">" characters meant.
I agree that threading is important now, but it is (IMNSHO) a technological solution to a social problem. I find hat unfortunate.