[FRIAM] lurking

[Eric Charles]

Steve,
Players in the top stakes tend to pay for their seats by the hour. At the
stakes I (and, I presume, Dave) play at, the house rakes the hands - at a
variable rate, usually with a cap of something like $5 per pot, and maybe a
few more bucks into a jackpot/promotion pool. At the lowest stake that rake
is significant, and should noticeably impact how you play. But at middle or
upper stakes, it doesn't affect much.

Dealers make most of their money off of tips. Standard tips in the games I
play is $1 a hand, and if it's a very big pot some players will tip $5 or
more. A good dealer can average 20-30 hands an hour. At the bigger games,
where there aren't small chips on the table, it wouldn't be unusual for all
the players to just give the dealers a set amount when they start at the
table. (This is cash games. Poker tournaments would be a whole different
discussion.)

Professional players (and serious amateurs) simply think about having an
edge that - after you account for the variance - produces an hourly rate.
This is usually expressed in terms of big blinds per hour (or big blinds
per 100 hands, if you are an online player). 5 big blinds an hour is a good
edge in live play, and it can go up from here. More than 10 would be
extremely dominant. So, if you are a good player at the $2/$5 ante level,
you can probably make $25-40 an hour (i.e., you have a 5-8 bb per hour
edge).

Because the house and the dealers and the players make money as long as
the game continues, this is the one game in the casino where the house and
the regular players are on the same team. Everyone just wants as many games
as possible to keep going forever.

Exploitative play, and gaming your opponents can be very important,
especially at lower levels. But if you vary too far from a fundamentally
sound strategy to do that, and the table has 2 or 3 reasonable players,
then while you are focused on maximizing profit from the drunk fish, the
more fundamentally sound players will eventually get your money. If you are
at a Casino where it is easy to go from the table games and slots to the
poker table, there can be a steady stream of bad players, but most poker
rooms these days are off to the side where they are harder to stumble into,
and if it is a full table (8-10 players), then you'll probably need to
respect the play of at least 2 or 3 of them.

Casual players (drunk or otherwise) don't have any idea how to balance a
range. Balance, in this context, refers to having the right ratio of
bet-for-value hands to bluff hands. For example, if we are pre-flop, and
there is a raise, and then another raise (called a 3-bet), and then another
raise (4-bet), with almost any player at lower stakes you can be certain
that the final raiser has a pair of queens or better (QQ, AK, KK, AA is
under 3% of hands). So unless you have aces or kings, it should be an easy
fold. With some players you can put them on exactly a pair of aces - they
would have called or folded with anything literally else! --- A solid GTO
player should be 4 betting something like 6-8% of the time, so that rate
would suggest a solid player. --- If you have someone who's 4 betting 20%
of the time, then they are WAY out of line, and should be easy to exploit
(call or raise all, depending on how you expect them to respond, with a
linear range of something like Jacks or better, which is about 6% of
hands). 20% x 6% suggests you have a big pre-flop confrontation with the
aggressor in just over 1% of hands.

The intuition and social-emotional game can affect the stuff above, because
it affects the % of times your opponent makes certain moves in certain
situations. Unless you have gotten someone acting crazy though, it
shouldn't really affect how you play except in edge cases. If you have a
hand that should mix calling vs. folding, and you are against a player who
over-bluffs (statistically speaking), then you should strongly lean towards
calling. Etc.. But most hands, in most situations will have a clear way
they should be played, no matter who the opponent is (because doing
otherwise would create too much risk of your being beaten badly by the
people at the table who are half-decent).

Generally speaking, the pros at a given dollar value will have similar
skill levels. If anyone wasn't in the right league, they'd lose money and
have to drop down, and if they were seriously outclassing the other
players, they would probably make more money at a higher stake, even though
they would have less of an edge there. That assumes you are at a Casino
with enough levels where there are enough levels that you have the option
to move up or down.

<echarles at american.edu>


On Mon, Nov 8, 2021 at 5:51 PM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

> DaveW-
>
> Congratulations (or condolences) on your move to Vegas.  Another reference
> gave me the sense you might be at least *wintering* there.
>
> I probably would not be surprised (though shocked) by what Casinos can
> ban.  I didn't mean to suggest that they didn't have the self-granted
> authority to ban cell phones, etc.  but rather doing so would severely
> impact their popularity among the hordes of marks who happily come to give
> up their spare (or not so) cash to feed the bright lights and other
> egregious displays of wealth.
>
> The Thomas Bass rendition of Farmer et alia foray into exploiting
> manufacturing/wear biases in roulette wheels  Eudamonic Pie
> <https://www.thomasbass.com/the_eudaemonic_pie_1360.htm> suggests that
> today the same effort would be "trivial" with nothing more perhaps than a
> cell phone camera/computer observing from a shirt pocket.    Of course,
> those biases have long since been ameliorated one way or another I am
> sure.
>
> You describe poker tables as the one place the house has no stake in the
> game.  I have to admit that i don't know who pays the rent/real-estate on
> the table?  Is there a flat-rate rake-off from every pot?  Does the dealer
> live on tips?
>
> When the Native Casinos opened here, my elderDotter was turning 18 and she
> had a friend who thought she wanted to grow up to be a blackjack dealer so
> they frequented the casino.  I don't know that my daughter lost/spent much
> money on it, but she never had any illusions that she could "beat the
> house".   I think their game was blackjack which I understand has the
> built-in tiny but positive bias to the house (the house wins all ties by
> convention?).   I told both daughters as they approached college that I had
> saved enough for them to be able to go through a BS/BA degree with only
> part-time/summer work contribution (or healthy scholarship) on their
> part.   I suggested that I cash it out and take it to the casino and drop
> it all on red or black (Roulette) with the understanding that their odds
> ware just a smidge short of doubling their money vs losing it all (the one
> green slot represents the house advantage?).  The conceit was that if they
> *won* they would then have enough cash to "coast" through college as *many*
> of their peers seemed to be supported or else if they *lost* they could
> forego any implied obligation of going to college.   They both honestly
> mulled it for at least 10 seconds before they rolled their eyes and said
> "no way!".
>
> I'm curious how you feel about my claim that the inter-personal dynamic at
> the poker table is in some sense more important than the technical skill?
> My point in your case would be that you would be *at* a table where the
> technical skill level was roughly even, right?   Tournament play tends to
> support that, right?   As you advance, the skill level of your table-peers
> increases until you either step up YOUR game or fail out of the game?
>
> I think of you as having a strong mix of technical approach, intuition,
> and likely to engage in the social-emotional game as well (e.g. bluffing).
>
> - Steve
> On 11/8/21 9:42 AM, Prof David West wrote:
>
> You would be surprised at what casinos can ban. Maybe even more surprised
> at the, not necessarily AI, software tools they use to analyze video feeds
> and pounce on any kind of statistically improbabilities. Most casinos in
> Vegas have tools, like mandatory side bets with very low odds, that erase
> the near equal odds of blackjack.
>
> The only 'safe' gambling is poker where the house has no direct interest
> in the outcome.
>
> As DES stated, winning is a matter of patience and losing antes only,
> until you get good hand and then skill of playing that hand for maximum
> return — playing less worse than the others at the table.
>
> I am living in Vegas now and playing small tournaments fairly regularly.
>
> davew
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 7, 2021, at 7:23 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
>
>
> On 11/7/21 12:02 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>
> There must be some kind of “Back to the future” movie that can be made out
> of this.  Doyne Farmer in Vegas all over again, but with current-era AI in
> place of toe-operated computers.
>
> Yah!  Surely Casinos can't begin to restrict computers(phones)/earbuds,
> etc.  on the gaming floor.
>
> Strange coincidence that my sister went to Kindergarten with Vance Packard
> (Norm's brother) in Silver City long before they all became eagle scouts
> and then the Chaos Cabal.  We moved away the next year and I doubt I ever
> met any of them back then.   I came to LANL just before (I think) Doyne
> came... I seem to remember that Norm was there for a summer...  and soon
> came the (in)famous CA conference...   As I remember it the game of
> interest (aside from Life, what with Conway in attendance) was GO with a
> lot of speculation about the implications of local vs global
> "intelligence"...   I was intrigued by HashLife and it's implications for
> finding structure at many scales... I still hope for someone with more
> follow-through than I have to implement a more redundant but "thorough"
> space-time decomposition (an N-1xN-1 kernel over the 4 positions at each
> "zoom" level).
>
> Regarding poker.. I played some low-stakes in college and saw there were
> two things to take in:   the main technical skill was to simply play less
> poorly than the other players at the table and that was entirely
> overshadowed by the social-engineering games of bluffing, etc.   The very
> simple game-theoretic aspect of not depleting your own stake before you
> catch a "lucky streak" going your way was also a good understanding.   I
> played with my "boss" and a number of peers at the time and realized that
> it was more about jockeying for position at work and drinking beer than it
> was about winning/losing.  I think the most I ever lost/won was on the
> order of $20-$40 which in those days was roughly 1-2 shifts wages... a LOT
> if I joined them weekly... too rich for my blood!  I still feel that
> *technically* playing well really means just playing less badly.
> Blackjack being even more obviously so?
>
>
> Yikes.
>
>
>
> On Nov 7, 2021, at 1:56 PM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
>
> My inclination would be to invest in standoff biometrics (e.g. Eulerian
> Video Amplification) and then find the best poker playing code.   It ought
> to be possible to automate and perhaps get rich in the process.
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Eric Charles
> *Sent:* Sunday, November 7, 2021 7:42 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] lurking
>
> I DID read all the thread so far... but I'm curious how we got to one of
> the starting points: "as cringy as it may be for some dork to be proud of
> their Poker prowess"
>
> I am somewhat satisfied with my Poker mediocrity, certainly not proud of
> it... but if I met someone who was ACTUALLY startlingly better than I am,
> and they were proud of that, I wouldn't find it cringy. (Ditto in my other
> hobbies, like Aikido.)
>
> I guess if I met someone who had a slight edge in their drunk-buddy home
> games, and they were super proud of THAT, then i would find it cringy.
> (Ditto someone who's the best Aikido student in their small dojo, but who's
> obviously not more than that.)
>
> When I see academic work on game theory, it's usually of lower quality
> than what the good poker players are doing these days. Mastering the game
> is crazy hard, and being able to sit down and implement a coherent and
> winning strategy for 40-80 hours a week is not easy. So... why would that
> be cringe?
>
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 3, 2021 at 1:42 PM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
> wrote:
>
> Ok, part of the story is knowing what is really needed for reproducibility
> as a function of context.
> With that, then there's the matter of how much control is afforded.   Is
> it programmable in predictable ways?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
> Sent: Wednesday, November 3, 2021 8:20 AM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] lurking
>
> Yeah, I agree. But context is Queen. When the virus is created in the lab,
> it's done with real stuff distilled from the soupy world. Given enough of a
> difference in context, the robot may not be able to re-constitute the life
> because the soupy world surrounding the robot doesn't have the real stuff
> required. Such drastic context changes could be a result of translation
> through space or time. E.g. trying to construct, on Mars, an organism
> read/serialized on earth. Or e.g. trying to construct an organism read
> millennia ago, millennia in the future. It's naive to talk about "science"
> as if any given read-out formula thereby expressed is *complete*. Science
> is abstraction to a large extent ... maybe not as abstracting as math, of
> course. And science must remain "open" precisely because any formula it
> expresses is suspect, perhaps incomplete.
>
> My favorite example is the magic brewing stick:
> https://medievalmeadandbeer.wordpress.com/2019/05/04/scandinavian-yeast-logs-yeast-rings/
>  It *was* scientific to lay out the magic stick as a critical element of
> the brewing process, only to discover later that the stick isn't the
> important part.
>
> On 11/2/21 2:39 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> > Even if that were so, viruses have been pulled from history or tweaked
> and created in the lab.   So we have a design specification, and the means
> to make it.    One could imagine a robot fabricating the close-to-the-metal
> machine too.   There is a story one can write down how it is done.   If
> there is no story, it is not science we are talking about, it is something
> else.
>
>
> --
> "Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
> ☤>$ uǝlƃ
>
>
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