What a joke

One of my favorite pastimes has been making fun of stupid things about poker that Brother Ed Miller says on his blog. Sometimes I comment on it here, sometimes at playingnolimitpoker.

But Brother Ed has taken away one of my favorite pastimes by making his blog a pay site. What a twit. The guy's just an unfriendly neighbor.

Bill-O and poker

Bill O'Reilly discovers poker blogging.

Effective yesterday, all articles on the site (Brother Ed's blog) older than 30 days are unavailable. We’re going to develop a system to allow the content to be accessed for a fee, and when it’s ready the archive articles will be available again at some cost per article.

What an ultimate weenie.
He's happy with providing free content.

My original vision for this site was that it would be free to read. I always intended to make money from it, but I wanted that money to come from advertising, from donations, and from other sources, not from my readers. For a year and a half I’ve been delighted with how that free-to-read model has been working out.

But his evil masters have objected.

For about the last nine months, behind the scenes, I’ve been receiving pressure and threats aimed at forcing me either to shut down Noted Poker Authority or to make the vast majority of its content available for pay only (sounds ridiculous, I know). Up until now I’ve refused. But it’s become unpleasant and disruptive enough to me that I’m giving in. I’m not proud of it, but when I weighed my options this one made the most sense for me personally.

It's not really his fault, he's just a pawn in the hands of "those who control him".

I’m not happy with this solution, but to me it was basically either this or take the site down completely, so I’m going with this.

Pathetic.

Fear and confusion in no limit poker

Sometimes it's hard coming up with topics to write on. It's so much easier to find a topic somebody else wrote on then pick on what they write. Original thought makes my head hurt.

I don't get a lot of work done, but I wouldn't get nearly as much written if I didn't have brother Ed feeding me straight lines.

He has a recent post on betting patterns that indicate weakness in opponents. The post was okay, although as he's been doing a lot lately I think he showed some symptoms of FPS, I don't think some of the betting patterns he talks about are nearly as reliable as he seems to think. In particular I think it can be a huge mistake to treat a small lead bet on the flop as a reliable indication of weakness by itself.

But what I really want to pick on this post is his lead. He starts with

Being too readable can really hurt your no-limit game.

I certainly don't have any arguement about that.

Winning no-limit depends on fear and surprise.

Whoa.

Actually I don't think he meant "fear", I think he meant "confusion", but the idea that you should try to instill fear is a pretty common one and it's a really bad idea.

Fear is a fairly strong emotion. When I was in the Navy and heard the sound of incoming artillery I felt fear. My stomoch knoted up, my mind raced, adrenalin pumped, my body reacted with automatic defense reactions (I ducked and hit the deck hard). So I know what fear is, but I've never felt fear at a poker table. (Well, I did once.

Some opponents do feel fear, and they will be easy to exploit. But there aren't very many of them. The ones that will cause you seriuos trouble are the ones who aren't going to be fearful and will also be able to exploit you if you try to rely on instilling fear as an important part of your gameplan.

So, don't be predicable. Confuse them whenever possible. But don't try to scare them. It's wasted effort and will more likely backfire. The few times it will work are really only with opponents that are so easy to beat that you didn't need to instill fear to accomplish the task, it will only seem like instilling fear worked.

Aggression

Here's the lead on a recent post from Brother Ed.

Playing aggressively isn’t natural.

Huh?

Not Natural?

Maybe not for vegetarian yankees.

Picking on brother Ed

It's been a while since I picked on Brother Ed, but I've got to say something about this one. I may have mentioned it before, it's a post from back in May.

He says (talking about hyper aggressive limit games)

The reason they can be frustrating is that some of your “marginal” hands can feel hard to play. In a normal game, if you’re facing two cold on the turn and all you have is a weak top pair, you can just lay down. But in this game, you just don’t know. Is your top pair good? It’s hard to tell sometimes.

Then he goes on to completely miss the point. He misses two important characteristics of wild games.

1. Position is very, very important. Don't get involved with marginal hands without position on the action, not just position on the button.

2. The reason the top pair/nothing else hands are such a problem is that you don't have any good way to develop reliable estimates of the range of hands your opponents hold and the value of those hands are highly dependent on those ranges.

This is an example of a situation where getting married to the idea of EV gets you in trouble. To calculate the EV of top pair/nothing else you need a distribution of opponents hands. You don't have that. So you estimate that by estimating the distribution of possible distributions, etc. You end up computing (implicitly) the EV of the EV of the EV of X rather than just the EV of X. And the result will be highly sensitive to estimation errors.

You're just asking for trouble.

Better to think in terms of strong draws, hands that don't really depend that much on what the exact distribution of the other players hands are. If you have a flush draw it just doesn't matter that much what the possible range of kicker player 1 has or whether player 2 has a gutshot to go with his 2nd pair. You aren't going to make a big mistake estimating the EV (or at least bracketing the range of the EV) of a flush draw.

That's why, in my book, I point out the importance of making a distinction between AKo and AKs from early position in those type games. That's something Brother Ed has said is nuts. But the reality is that in those kinds of games you really are often just better off not getting involved with hands that are going to be tough to play.

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.

Pot odds

I ran across another blog post from Ed Miller that I kind of agree with. He explains why he doesn't like to emphasize pot odds.

I also think pot odds is something that's often given more emphasis than the topic deserves, for similar reasons to those he gives. Ed gives two reasons.

1. Discussing “pot odds” automatically makes many newer players assume that they are behind.

I'm not so sure I agree with this reason. He goes on to say

The chance that your hand is best is more important when the pot is big.

and he's right about that. But a big pot doesn't make it more likely your hand is best.

I agree that you shouldn't just automatically assume that you're behind, but the recent history of both you and the other guy, plus the texture of the board is what figures into that calculation, not the size of the pot.

It's his second reason that I do agree with strongly.

2. Discussion of “pot odds” makes people play more passively.

I've often said "Pot odds is for losers". It's about calling and that's the last thing you should be thinking about.

Ed has the potential to be a pretty bright guy if he wasn't such an awful judge of character.