[FRIAM] lurking
Marcus Daniels
marcus at snoutfarm.com
Mon Nov 8 21:06:36 EST 2021
The important thing is that there is still an enduring addiction.
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Monday, November 8, 2021 6:00 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] lurking
Lol.... ok.... but also there are plenty of Casino's available with no smoking.... Welcome to The Future.
On Mon, Nov 8, 2021 at 8:32 PM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com<mailto:wimberly3 at gmail.com>> wrote:
Remind me never to go to a casino. The last time I was in one was to meet my lawyer whose office was in ABQ for lunch so we could split the driving time. I almost choked from the cigarette smoke.
---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM
On Mon, Nov 8, 2021, 6:09 PM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm<mailto:profwest at fastmail.fm>> wrote:
SteveS,
Your intuitions are spot on, based on my experience. Although casinos can't ban cell phones, you may not use one at the table - must step away and not have a hand in play. The do detect and ban all kinds of electronic transmissions — radio to infrared and if you have such a transmitter on your person you are quickly escorted out and banned. Receivers are harder to detect except when actively 'receiving' but same result if discovered.
Blackjack has a published 'standard game' written up years ago — casinos will actually give you a copy — that maximizes the players odds of winning, at least long term. However there are lots of tricks employed to remove even that vestige of a chance, like mandatory side bets, and paying even odds instead of 3/2 for a blackjack if your bet is below some minimum.
Casinos are also masters of facial recognition — probably better tech than anything any government (including China) or Facebook can command. Once banned, even hookers, you will never get more than a few feet into a big casino before security descends — even if disguised.
Cash game poker, the house takes a standard rake — 10% up to a limit — of the pot as table rent and dealers receive tips plus a minimum wage hourly rate. Seniority determines which dealers get to service the high limit (hence high tips) tables.
Tournaments: house takes a portion of the entry fee and rest goes into pot. Dealers get hourly rate, plus tips are collected from winners and distributed evenly.
Poker is luck plus very astute inter-personal observation. One of my favorite players, Daniel Negreanu, has a Master Class that provides all kinds of technical skill, but he does not play that way, instead seat of the pants observations and table talk determine his strategy. Not that he is unaware of or lacks the technical chops, they are just not the ultimate arbitrator of play — mostly because all the others in tournaments at his level have the same degree of technical skill.
I did some consulting to casinos a few years back when Highlands was trying to start a casino / hospitality program. I have never seen such sophisticated and secure systems before or since.
James Swain has a series of mystery books — first in series is Grift Sense — with plots that center on one major attempt to defraud a casino and many little side plots that reveal all the different attempts to "cheat" casinos. Fun reads.
A strategy for short term winning at roulette: bet 10 each on two of the 1/3 sections of the table (rows or columns) plus one of the 1:1 sections (even/odd, red/black, top half-bottom have of the board), plus 1 dollar on the 0-00 line (half odds but both covered). However, this will not work if you play more than a 10-15 minutes because it only takes 4.5 times when none of your bets hit before you are wiped out. This apparently works because the wheel DOES have a bias, mostly from the way the dealer sends the ball around the wheel. Watch the history board for patterns that reveal the ever so slight but real bias.
davew
On Mon, Nov 8, 2021, at 3:51 PM, Steve Smith 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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
Sent: Wednesday, November 3, 2021 8:20 AM
To: friam at redfish.com<mailto: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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