Counter-factual thinking

This is an interesting short video on the value of counter-factual thinking.



Although they talk about it in terms of a life narrative it's also a valuable way to approach a self-evaluation of your poker game.

Poor Linda

Sometimes I just feel sorry for Linda at Table Tango. She's probably a nice person, she's just not very bright and is a little weak in the language skills area.

I know she doesn't like me. In the past she's talked about how professional she is (she's a poker dealer, recently retired) and I laughed at the idea that a gaming/hospitality industry employee who publically gossips about specific customer gambling experiences. I just think that's laughable. She's offended by my sense of humor.

Because of that she won't link to me. It just pains her too much to think that she might do something good for somebody who's not impressed by her lack of recognition of her own lack of professionlism. I think it's all pretty funny. I do okay without links from idiots who think the world is zero sum.

The other day I linked to one of her posts from my AmericanTradition blog. She had made a post about having bought two trucks from a dealer who she'd never had a positive experience with. I thought that was pretty funny and asked the rhetorical question of how can that happen? How do you get to the point where you've bought two trucks and never had a positive experience with them? Beats me.

She checked to see who'd linked to her, saw my comment, and saw that it was me, and made a nasty response on her blog. I get an RSS link to her blog so I saw the first few words of the post even after she'd deleted the post. Yep, she made a response which linked to me, realized the terrible thing she'd done, and deleted the post. Can't be doing something that might benefit a mortal enemy (blogs benefit from links for many reasons, such as the search engines upgrade it's perception of your blog if people link to you).

That's okay. It's about what I'd expect from a dimwit. But the really funny part is how she lead off the deleted post.

What if you bought the two trucks before you NEVER had a positive experience?

That's funny.

You start off with never having had a positive experience. That's at day zero. It's not possible to buy anything before you NEVER had a positive experience.

I shouldn't make fun of her. If she actually had language skills she wouldn't have been a poker dealer all her life. But she probably is a nice person.

How stupid can you be?

Pretty stupid it seems.

I'm watching a show in CNBC about greed and frauds.

One of the events featured is a guy who scammed the regular's in a private home poker game with a Ponzi/check kiting scheme. Many thousands.

In the poker game his habit of shorting the pot is so well known that they make jokes about it.

And they gave this guy tens of thousands of cash at a time to "invest".

I'lll never understand people.

Update: The second scam recruits most of the "investors" in the Circus/Circus poker room in Reno.

Barry Hunt is the guy's name. In Reno he used the name Jonathan Firestone. Anybody know him?

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.

Self Deception

There's a thread on rgp that started out with questioning something some poker player claimed in an interview.

In a recent Cardplayer magazine interview, Paul Wasicka claimed that
when he started playing, he was making between $1000-3000 a day
playing $10-20 Hold 'Em.

I don't think he's making that up, but I do think he's being somewhat self-deluded when he makes a claim like that.

Someone accused him of lying and I responded with this.

It's not really lying so much as it is a form of self-deception.

You see the same thing with waitresses, strippers, used car salesmen, and other
residents of trailer parks. When you ask them how much they make on an average
day they'll tend to answer with an approximation of an average good day, not an
average day. It's just the way they think.

Fuzzy brained people just don't have many rational thoughts. They don't really
make stuff up as much as it is they just don't understand the question.

I think that was probably his typical win range on a good day. That's not an average though, and like most people I think he just doesn't think about the difference all that clearly. There's really no reason why he should.

Then somebody took that as an opportunity to try to insult me in a way that I think is pretty funny. He said.

Gary is right. For example, look at the way he deceives himself about
his non-existent academic credentials and his non-existent poker
ability, even when the rest of the world can see what a useless, self-
important idiot he is.

What's funny about it is that it's completely contrary to pretty much anything I've ever claimed about myself. It's an example of how little people do pay attention to things and how little they tend to understand what they see or hear.

I have a couple of master's degrees. That means I've been an academic failure. I've attempted 3 different PhD programs, at 3 different schools, in 3 different fields. That's given me a pretty broad and pretty solid education, but it's not what I'd call academic credentials. I've often called myself a failed academic and I think my academic record supports that assessment pretty solidly.

As far as poker ability, I've never in my life claimed anything other than I can't play for shit.

So, while it might well be true that I'm a useless idiot, I think it's a stretch to call a clear and admitted failure delusionally self-important.

Anyway, I just thought it was funny.