Crazy Asian Gambler

I've been reading The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why.

A basic premise of the book is that

The Chinese believe in constant change, but with things always moving back to some prior state. They pay attention to a wide range of events; they search for relationships between things; and they think you can't understand the part without understanding the whole

and

Westerners live in a simpler, more deterministic world, they focus on salient objects or people instead of the larger picture; and they think they can control events

This has strong implications as an explanation for the stereotypical Crazy Asian Gambler. That Crazy Asian Gambler is playing the table, not playing individual opponents.

There really is a difference. That was part of the point I was trying to make in my hold'em book when I talked about adapting to table conditions as opposed to other author's suggestions that you should adapt to particular opponents. You can profit from exploiting characteristics of the total mix at the table without having to worry about exploiting individual opponents. That's what the successful Crazy Asian Gambler is doing.

I think this is actually pretty profound stuff.

Class and style

When you're reading a story that has a passage like this one,

When someone orders a bottle of Cristal they bring it to you in STYLE. About 4 or 5 waitresses come out all with flares and the theme song to rocky plays loud.

equating flares and the theme from Rocky with style, then you know you're reading a story that has no where to go and no time to get there.

Attribution bias

Rational is not the normal mode of thought or behavior for human beings. That's just not how we evolved. We are full of behavioral and mental bias.

One of those biases is called the attribution bias. That's a name for the human tendency to take personal credit for any success we may achieve, but to blame outside forces (such as other people) for any failures. It's normal to do that, it's natural, it's the way we think.

And, it's an explanation for the question asked in a two plus two thread, why do we hate donkeys?

Why is it that I get soooo angry while playing someone that hasn't a clue! I should actually be happy while playing a donk because in the long run that is who I get the money from. Yet everytime they suck out after putting their money in way behind it really {censored} pisses me off.

(since two plus two is a family site that apparently targets children, they censor certian words in the posts).

In the case of getting drawn out on the attribution bias might tend to give you the correct attribution when you lose, because the cause of losing the pot is an outside force, the cause is just the particular order of the cards in the deck for this one event. But for those of us who have rage control issues (I was watching a Soprano's DVD last night that dealt with rage) it's much more comfortable to make the attribution somewhere other than an inanimate force like randomness. It's much more satisfying to blame the other guy and give us an object for our rage.

What can you do about it? Two things. One is work really hard at the idea of attribution of events, stop always taking credit for every success and stop trying to find a cause for every failure. The other thing is to go to an anger management class.

The 50k event

I really should be writing more about the 2007 WSOP that's going on.

The $50,000 buy-in HORSE event should be finishing up in a couple of days. Today is the third day of a five day marathon.

I don't know what to think about the event. Martin Derbyshire of PokerListings seems to think it's a big deal

...the $50k H.O.R.S.E. event seems to be the tournament most top pros feel is the one that will decide who the best poker player in the world is, making it the true main event of the 2007 WSOP.

I think it's more accurate to say that many top pros want it to be the one that will decide who is the best poker player in the world.

Not because of the HORSE aspect, although that's what they might tell you. But because of the $50,000 part -- that's the part that makes it self-selecting elite.

It's a 5 day event with only 148 entries.

I used to be that pros went for the money and let the amateurs have the bracelets. It was a pro that took the money in exchange for taking a dive to let Maria Stern win a bracelet a few years ago. I took such a deal a few years ago in a small tournament in Bay St. Louis when Casino Magic was giving out cheap trophies to winners of their daily tournaments. When we got heads up I took the money and let the other guy have the trophy. But because of the fame and endorsement opportunities, it's the pros who are willing to buy off competitors to increase their chances at a bracelet.

Of course an event with few entries will be attractive to most fame-seeking pros. But that has nothing to do with determining who's "best".

Jealous

"You're just jealous".

An article in the Sacramento Bee triggered a blog post at Althouse on that phrase being used to put down women.

Put down women? Are they saying that poker fans are a bunch of women?

You drew to a gutshot 5?

That was the capstone question of the night in my mind.

The flop was really ragged looking. A 4 8 T with two diamonds and a spade.

The protagonist of our story bet $10 into a field of 5 or so preflop limpers and got two callers.

The turn was the Ace of spades. He fired again, this time $25 and was called by our hero.

The 5c came on the river. Our protagonist fired another $25. This time our hero made it $125. Our protagist called, our hero showed a 7s6s.

That’s when I heard the moaning question, “You drew to a gutshot five?”.

But the guy who asked that question isn’t the idiot in our story. That role is filled by our hero, who proceeded to explain the double gutshot draw that pickup up a flush draw on the turn.

Making moves

What is a move?

I really don't know.

PokerNews has an article by Tim Lavali about the Pareto Principle applied to poker that talks about moves.

The Pareto Principle is the 80/20 rule. 80% of the benefit comes from 20% of the effort.

Lavali uses the term move in a way that implies it's some kind of attempt to use deception, not straight-forward behavior.

The second part, which is perhaps a more advanced play, is that many really good moves at the poker table need a set-up. You need to make the first bet and fold to the reraise a few times to set the player up for the big kill. Or you need to not defend your blinds, in order to pounce when the blind stealer gets too greedy. So, you are using moves and plays that you know will lose you small amounts of chips, in order to set up the big score.

He seems to think everything is so calculated, so planned out. It's all manipulation, doing things that have a purpose of causing a certain reaction in your opponent that becomes habit to them which you can exploit later. Part of a move is conditioning your opponent.

I supposed there's something to that. I don't know. I think of it more as observation of how a specific opponent reacts and then exploiting that later.

Is poker really about moves that require a setup intended to condition your opponents?

Online poker room cultures

The Poker Chronicles has a nice post about historical changes in market supremacy among online poker rooms.

I find it odd and somewhat disheartening that Paradise Poker is switching to Boss Media's network. It sort of marks the end of an era in online poker, just like Kmart going bankrupt did for retail. I remember playing on Dise back when it had first opened and the only real competitor was Planet Poker. Their software was so much better, even for those of us who didn't know that Planet Poker's shuffle had been taken advantage of, that it was practically in a different league. It was what made me believe that some day online poker might be almost as good as the real thing.

I don't have quite the same emotional attachment to the downfall of Paradise, but it interesting to look at the ups and downs of individual poker rooms. One of the things that's changed in the poker world is the concept of celebrity. What made a poker celebrity 10 years ago isn't what makes a poker celebrity today. Poker rooms that understand that have done well, those that didn't understand if fell by the wayside.

Online poker started with Planet Poker. The main thing they provided was being first. The software was clunky, their software maintenance was not user-friendly (they had complete shutdown every Tuesday morning for maintenance.) They really didn't have much going for them. But they were first and they thrived. When online poker people said PP you knew they meant Planet Poker.

Then came Paradise Poker. What they offered was clean looking and clean operating software. Planet Poker responding to the better product by hiring two celebrity spokespersons -- Mike Caro and Roy Cooke. Both derived their celebrity from writing for Card Player Magazine. In those days Card Player Magazine was the poker magazine market, and the magazine strongly featured it's writers.

Today that market is a little different. Card Player isn't only part of the market and almost all poker magazines these days feature players seen on TV, not the writer's. Poker writer's aren't the celebrities they were in the past. That movement away from featuring writer's and featuring players started with June Field when she established Poker Digest and put players on the cover as opposed to Card Player who always put casinos on the cover. Card Player tried to stem the competition by buying Poker Digest, but the market was destined to grow way to fast for them to maintain a stranglehold on it.

Planet Poker's attempt to compensate for an inferior product by using celebrity flopped. They just kept losing market share.

But Paradise Poker also failed to respond adequately to competition. For a while the term PP no longer meant Planet Poker, it meant Paradise Poker. But that didn't last long. Party Poker came along showing a high degree of competence in promotion. They established strong affiliates, they had high player bonuses (funded by high rakes). Then when poker hit TV they hit it with ads. They succeeded in a huge way. It was all about promotion.

An underfunded room, Poker Spot, came along and tried to establish a niche by copying Party Poker's high player bonuses and combining it with tournaments. They were the first room to offer tournaments. But, it's harder to get away with very large rakes in tournaments and they quickly found that the high player bonuses didn't self fund without high rakes. They flopped in a big way.

But Poker Stars did succeed with their tournament offerings. Chris Moneymaker helped establish them as a new brand of poker celebrity -- a TV celebrity.

TV makes a huge difference in the value of celebrity. Something Planet Poker didn't last long enough to figure out.

On my mathandpoker blog

I have a blog elsewhere where I talk about topics related to application of mathematics to poker and other gambling games. I have more than one blog because it helps me segment the things I write about. I'm not sure that's really productive, but it's what I do anyway.

I common theme that I hit on time and time again on that blog is that poker is not mathematics, mathematics is a tool that can be used to help analyze poker, but mathematical models are not the game itself.

Formulating a model, adjusting a model, validation of a model, all those topics are the main meme of the blog.

This post is about the culture of poker, so bear with me.

Anyway, I made a blog post at mathandpoker that commented on something that Ed Miller had posted on his blog.

Although I don't think much of Ed, he has a terrible track record in evaluation of the character of people, the post wasn't critical of Ed personaly in any way that I can see, although it was critical of something he'd said and the way he said it. (This statement is critical of Ed personally, not the post I originally made).

His mistake was an over-reliance on the concept of EV, something that on it's surface seems to many to be something that's impossible to do. It's not at all impossible to do. It's a topic I've talked about before.

I often hit on statistical or mathematical sacred cows on that blog. For example, the first post I made in that blog, in June 2006, was an attack on the popular idea in poker that you have to have huge sample sizes. I've made other posts pointing out the importance of looking at things other than the sample size when considering how much data you need, the most recent being yesterday.

A blind reliance on EV is also a common theme. My earliest post on that topic was in July 2006, the second month of the blog. Micheal Trick also has a nice comment on that post.

This is what I'd said in that first post on expected value.

If you really want to optimize your stratagy and maximize your win, they you just have to look at the game in a global sense. A strategic Expected Value of a collection of actions is what you need to consider, not a tactical Expected Value of one action.

Micheal Trick related my comments about poker to some airline scheduling problems he'd been working on (he's not a poker player) and he said

The problem with both the poker example and crew scheduling is that the objective is much “fuzzier” than the underlying main objective. And that makes it much harder to “optimize”.

The point is often overlooked, but the reality is that EV is often only part of the story, it's seldom the entire story in situations that have any complexity to them at all.

But EV has been elevated to religious status in the poker world. I'm not sure why. But a worship of EV has become part of the culture.

Some blog software will pick up any other blog reference to a post and put a link to it in the comments section. Ed Miller's software does that. So, my post showed up as a comment on his blog. That's fine with me, it's the way blogs should work, blogs should have software features that advance the conversation. But what I was doing wasn't really writing a comment about Ed so much as using Ed's post as a point to step off and advance an existing meme on the evils of a tunnel vision focus on EV. I don't think many of Ed's readers realized that.

The reaction I got from Ed's readers was more like something I'd have expected from Kansas school board members to somebody who pointed out that Jerry Falwell was an ignorant bigot.

It's not surprising, given the religious status of EV, and since 2+2 types think of themselves as high priests of that religion. But I think it's an interesting example of how the culture of poker works out.

Update:
One thing I don't think I made clear is that this blowback isn't about Ed Miller (or about me) it's about a religious reverence to EV = Sum(x * P(x)). Ed's wife seems to think it's about Ed and I made some comments on her blog that's probably more about Ed than it should have been.