If poker is ultimately a game of calculating odds why aren't mathematicians dominant?

Factual Questions
61

[QUOTE=Lemur866]
Unless every player plays every other player, then luck exists in the opponents you draw. A good player can win against an average player, but will lose against a great player. Imagine a chess tournament, if you draw Kasparov as your opponent you’re going to score poorly even if you are a grand master.

[/quote]

Of course there is no luck of the draw in an all-play-all tournament.
And in a Swiss tournament, losing to a strong player leads to easier opposition.
Anyway I don’t consider getting a strong opponent to be unlucky. It’s a chance to learn and to gain a mass of rating points. Your fate is determined by the skill of both players.
Luck is when someone throws dice e.g. in Monopoly. No skill involved.

[QUOTE=Lemur866]

And even in a game where no random events happen, there is still a luck factor.

Suppose you’re playing Diplomacy, and you want to attack a province. There are two ways you can attack the province, and two ways your opponent can defend the province. One of your attacks will beat one of his defenses but lose to the other, and the other of your attacks will lose to his first defense but beat the other.

At this point, it’s a matter of luck whether you choose the correct attack. You have no way of predicting his defense, he has no way of predicting your attack, so you’re essentially flipping a coin. So even though there’s no random event in the game, there’s still a luck factor because neither player can predict who will win the round.
[/QUOTE]

Well firstly being in such a position is an advantage. Which you gained by your previous play.
Secondly the negotiations with each of your neighbours easily outweigh the ‘luck’ you mention above.
I remember facing two ‘juggernauts’ (England+France and Russia+Turkey) in the UK Championships. I was Italy and the clods playing Germany + Austria were more concerned with bashing each other than allying with me. :rolleyes:
Once Germany + Austria were out, it looked curtains for me. So I told both juggernauts that I would hand over all my 4 units to the one that didn’t attack me first.
Result: a 5 way draw.

62

[QUOTE=Pasta]
I think the confusion here may be clarified by the following example.

Imagine duplicate “guess the color”. It’s just like duplicate bridge, except the team has to guess what color some single unseen card is. Every team in the tourney plays the same sequence of cards.

While no team has an advantage over any other, I’d be hard pressed not to say this game has luck in it.

[/quote]

I don’t agree.
There’s no skill in this game, so it must be all luck.

[QUOTE=Pasta]

Bridge has analogous situations. (“Which opponent has the singleton heart?” “Where does the king of spades lie?”) The duplicate format means that luck provides no advantage to any team, but it doesn’t mean there is no randomness in the outcome (as opposed to, say, chess, which has no luck of any kind.)
[/QUOTE]

Randomness, yes. But that’s why top players know and use:

  • safety plays to guard against bad breaks
  • eliminations and throw-ins to avoid finesses
  • counting distribution, reading defensive signals and interpreting the bidding

These skill factors help eliminate the luck of the distribution.
I would go further and say that a good team will beat a weak team by a larger margin if there are more bad breaks.

Oh, and in chess technically having White is lucky (because there is approximately a 5% advantage.)

63

In any finite period of time, of course there is luck involved in poker. The best players in the world can and do get beaten up badly on occasion by rubes who happen to hit an unbelievably lucky string of cards. Talk to any professional player, and they’ll be able to tell you about bad luck streaks that hurt them and cause them to lose money for weeks and sometimes months on end. As the number of hands played goes up, eventually skill comes to dominate luck. But in the short run, luck is a dominating factor.

This is less true in shorthanded games and no limit poker. In a limit game with 10 players, luck is a big part of your results in a given night.

As for mathematicians playing poker, sure there are lots of them. Almost all the really good players I know have strong math backgrounds. One’s a computer scientist with a masters. Another has a degree in math. A third is an accountant. But being able to do math isn’t necessary to play the game. I don’t calculate pot odds while I’m playing except in rare circumstances.

Where math knowledge helps is in being able to see the big picture, to maintain that detached, critical frame of mind that allows you to look past the streaks and the luck and make the right plays over and over again. Players with weak understanding of math often make mistakes like chasing streaks, changing strategy because the right one isn’t ‘lucky’ for them, etc. You hear a lot of weak players saying stupid things like, “I’d rather have TJs than AA. I always lose with aces.” You’ll never hear a player who understands the math behind the game say that.

Mathematical knowledge is necessary to analyze the game and determine the correct strategy. If you’re writing a book on how to play poker, I hope you understand game theory, statistics, logic, and a host of other mathematical disciplines that help you determine what is and isn’t correct strategy. But when it comes to playing, you just need to be able to grasp the concepts that other people have figured out and apply them.

Sometimes too much focus on the math is a bad thing. I’ve seen players waste their mental effort in trying to determine exactly how many chips are in the pot so they can calculate whether they should call a certain sized bet with their drawing hand - and while being so distracted not noticing that the guy who bet probably doesn’t even have a real hand, or that the guy behind is already reaching for his chips to raise. Trying to do pot odds math at the margin is a waste of time, and your effort is much better expended examining your opponents and recognizing patterns in their play, or being able to see that if you hit your hand the player you’re up against is likely to pay you off.

Another way that overly-mathematical players can go wrong is that they treat the game mechanically. I’ve known players who bring books to the table and read while playing, and only look up when it’s their turn to act. They apply the pot-odds math and call or fold. Some of these players are winning players (barely), but could win much more if they’d throw the damned book away and start paying attention. I was guilty of that a bit myself when I first started playing - I thought I was this super-smart math guy who had it all figured out. But I saw the error of my ways in a few weeks and cut it out. Some players never see it.

64

[QUOTE=glee]
Randomness, yes. But that’s why top players know and use <skills>
[/quote]
I agree with the statement that duplicate bridge has very, very little luck in it. I also agree that skillful play can turn what appears to be a random situation into one with an optimal play. But I am making simply a mathematical (and for bridge, essentially irrelevant) claim that the duplicate format does not remove all luck.

If my duplicate “guess the color” game is too manifestly random, we could play duplicate “guess the color when you’ve seen 30 cards already.” The first 30 cards are dealt face up, and each team has to guess what color the 31st card is. In almost every hand played, there is a clear optimal strategy – guess the color that is less represented on the board. But occasionally there will be an even split, in which case the winner of the hand will be random.

Back to bridge, then: Do you claim the following:

Claim A: There can be no arrangement of cards (out of the 52!/(13!)[sup]4[/sup]/4 possible arrangements) such that optimum play (with all the bells and whistles of bidding interpretation, defensive play analysis, etc.) requires a 50%-50% decision that affects the number of tricks taken?

Claim A is a requirement for the statement “there is no luck in duplicate bridge” to hold true. If you say that Claim A is true, I will (skeptically) concede that duplicate bridge has no luck, as your bridge experience is far beyond mine. If you can prove Claim A, though, I’d be a lot happier :slight_smile: (as my intuition is that it is false.)

My main point, in summary: A duplicate format is not sufficient to eliminate luck from a card game.

65

[QUOTE=Gary T]
I would contend that poker is not ultimately a game of calculating odds. As Daniel Craig’s James Bond said (more or less) in the recent Casino Royale, he put a little work into learning how to play the cards, and a lot of work into learning how to play the people.
[/QUOTE]

Poker might not be ultimately a game of calculating odds (as in pot odds, and implied pot odds), but it is still immensely mathematical, and that James Bond quote is RETARDED. It’s a line for a movie, as has no semblance to playing real poker.

Chris “Jesus” Ferguson once said (roughly), “if you don’t think that poker is all math, then you don’t know the right math.”

Ferguson would out-play probably all but 50 players on earth if they had a two-way mirror where they could see him, and he couldn’t see them.

ESPECIALLY heads-up poker.

Anyway – to the OP, mathematical people are better than average people at poker. I’ve played with tons of them. I had a game that lasted for 6+ years with graduate level applied math students (and others).

IF they have the discipline to apply what they know, they’re dangerous. But, poker is still gambling, and a LOT of personality enters into how people gamble (protecting leads, chasing losses, etc.) whether it is poker, blackjack or whatever.

But, that’s a completely different kind of “human element” then just reading people. It’s altering your mathematical assessments of hands they’re holding based on factors other than random distribution of cards.

66

On a related note, there was/is the M.I.T. Blackjack ring, whose story is coming soon to a theater near you! (They’ve already been covered in various articles, books, and a nifty documentary that aired on the History Channel.)

67

As has been mentioned, training and intuition in psychology is key to winning at poker. While an economist can predict what an opponent would do if they were a rational agent, a psychologist can predict what a person will actually do. There is some evidence for this. Here’s a starting point: Psychologist wins world poker championships – Mind Hacks

68

[QUOTE=Pasta]
I agree with the statement that duplicate bridge has very, very little luck in it. I also agree that skillful play can turn what appears to be a random situation into one with an optimal play. But I am making simply a mathematical (and for bridge, essentially irrelevant) claim that the duplicate format does not remove all luck.

If my duplicate “guess the color” game is too manifestly random, we could play duplicate “guess the color when you’ve seen 30 cards already.” The first 30 cards are dealt face up, and each team has to guess what color the 31st card is. In almost every hand played, there is a clear optimal strategy – guess the color that is less represented on the board. But occasionally there will be an even split, in which case the winner of the hand will be random.

Back to bridge, then: Do you claim the following:

Claim A: There can be no arrangement of cards (out of the 52!/(13!)[sup]4[/sup]/4 possible arrangements) such that optimum play (with all the bells and whistles of bidding interpretation, defensive play analysis, etc.) requires a 50%-50% decision that affects the number of tricks taken?

Claim A is a requirement for the statement “there is no luck in duplicate bridge” to hold true. If you say that Claim A is true, I will (skeptically) concede that duplicate bridge has no luck, as your bridge experience is far beyond mine. If you can prove Claim A, though, I’d be a lot happier :slight_smile: (as my intuition is that it is false.)

My main point, in summary: A duplicate format is not sufficient to eliminate luck from a card game.
[/QUOTE]

Well I’d better own up. :o
There is indeed a tiny amount of luck in duplicate bridge. :eek:

However I was very disappointed by statements like:

The cards can fall in such a way as to favor N-S or E-W. That’s “luck.” Getting seated N-S or E-W when the cards are falling in favor of those seats is also “luck.”…

This is simply not true because of mathematical systems which completely eliminate the problem.

OK, here’s some bridge stuff:

If you hold KJxx opposite A9xx and need 3 tricks, there is a safety play to guarantee it, whatever the opposing distribution.
Here the luck is 100% eliminated (and this + similar situations do come up regularly).

If you have 2 finesses on a hand and only need one of them to work (or get a 3-3 break in another suit) to make a slam, it’s about 85% to make and you should bid the slam. It is bad luck if you bid it and the weaker opponents don’t.

There is a huge difference between rubber bridge (each hand dealt once, luck does often matter), where a club pair can beat a world-class pair in the short run, andc duplicate bridge where the leading teams inevitably rise to the top.

69

[QUOTE=glee]

OK, here’s some bridge stuff:

If you hold KJxx opposite A9xx and need 3 tricks, there is a safety play to guarantee it, whatever the opposing distribution.
Here the luck is 100% eliminated (and this + similar situations do come up regularly).

[/QUOTE]
Do you run the ace (in case Q is singleton), then play the J finesse? Seems like the best way to win 3 tricks, although I could well be wrong.

I played bridge last night in a normal club tournament for the first time, having previously been playing in a beginner’s class. We got crushed! I was actually thinking during the game that it was just inexorable, there was just no way me and my partner could get the better of the good players - which ties in to the bridge comments in this thread.

The big difference was in the play - it’s interesting that even experienced players can get the bidding wrong, happened a lot last night with our opponents. Me and my partner bid a pretty good set of games - didn’t get pushed around too much. The play was a different story. Hardly anyone seemed to make a mistake, really sound fundamental play all night. We make a lot of mistakes though, and got punished - came last!

70

[QUOTE=Pasta]
Claim A: There can be no arrangement of cards (out of the 52!/(13!)[sup]4[/sup]/4 possible arrangements) such that optimum play (with all the bells and whistles of bidding interpretation, defensive play analysis, etc.) requires a 50%-50% decision that affects the number of tricks taken?
[/QUOTE]
Of course that can happen. But everyone gets the same deal. That’s the whole point of duplicate. The more skilled players are better at guarding against such possibilities causing them to go down. Tannah Hirsch’s column yesterday gave good exampleof that.
[QUOTE=Tannah Hirsch]
West led the king of clubs and, since there was a sure club loser, the fate of the slam depended on avoiding a loser in hearts, where the finesse could be taken through either defender. If you are going to rely on divine guidance to tell you which way to finesse, you might do better just to claim 12 tricks - after all, the defenders might concede! A better way is to try to count the defenders’ hands.

Win the opening lead in hand, draw trumps in three rounds, East discarding two hearts, then clear three rounds of diamonds before exiting with the jack of clubs, both defenders following suit all the way. In with the queen of clubs, West continues with a club, on which East discards another heart. Now you can claim the contract!

West has shown up with three spades, three diamonds and six clubs, since East could not follow to the third round of the suit. Therefore West does not have room for more than one heart. Lead a heart to the king and then finesse East for the queen to land the slam.

[/QUOTE]