Oh sure, whoever wins any particular hand is mostly random and of little consequence. But you don’t just play one hand. If you and I sat down to play 1 on 1, with a reasonable structure (that is to say that the average amount we’ll be playing for isn’t a significant fraction of the amount of money we both have), and we agreed to play 500 hands, the chances of you being up at the end of the night against me is low. If we played 5000 hands, almost zero.
Now that’s a contrived scenario - and that’s why I don’t have a winning record against everyone who ever sat down at my table - but it means that over the long term if I’m better than the people I play against by a margin enough to cover the rake I’ll take a profit. As I said above, I’ve had losing days, weeks, months, even 3 or 4 months (bad times), but never a losing year. The more hands I play, the less the randomness affects my results, the greater it’ll tend to approach the expected rates.
On average, I’d when I had the advantage over you and how to go about making those pots bigger. Or when I was behind, and when to make those pots small or when to give up on them. I will do a much better job of figuring out what you think the strength of your hand is, and what you think the strength of my hand is, and your resulting strategies. I’ll notice patterns in your play, understand the sort of mistakes you make, and be able to adjust my strategy to account for that. I’ll understand the math involved - from the easy stuff like pot odds to more advanced things like semi-bluffs or implied odds, to way more complex stuff that even I have to slow down and think about sometimes.
Really, I wouldn’t have to pull out anything fancy, since you’re a novice level player. But against another good or even expert player, they know most or all of the concepts that I know, they know the math, they can observe my strategy - playing against them becomes a much trickier game. That game would involve a lot more meta-strategy based around what I thought he thought I was thinking, and what he thought I thought he thought I thought he thought I was thinking. It can actually go really deep with several different levels of thinking that you’d use based on the depth of knowledge you assessed your opponent to have. High level decisions can get really complicated and involve a lot of game theory derived strategy that wouldn’t be apparent at all to someone who had a much more basic understanding of the game.
Ok. Fair enough. I recall from looking at Nash equilibria and numerical solvers for simpler games than poker, that the optimal strategy often ends up being to choose randomly, with a particular probability weight assigned to each choice, from several choices.
So one method to hide information in poker would be to make your decision with some randomness - in situation A, 10% action 1, 30% action 2, 60% action 3, while in situation B, 20% action 1, 40% 2, 40% 3.
I think you should try to become an AI developer. (machine learning engineer, etc) Why not shoot for the ceiling? Don’t just become a regular programmer, become one with a top tier valuation to future employers.
That’s actually correct. It actually reminds me of one of my favorite poker jokes - “I fold pocket aces 12% of the time preflop for range balancing”
That sort of stuff comes into play in very high level play, when the players are so close in their knowledge of the game and strategy that they have to start thinking about game theory optimal strategies to gain any sort of edge (or lessen their weaknesses). You start assessing your options, and then assigning bayesian probability matrices to weight your action, even randomizing your actions as to prevent any sort of exploitable tendencies. The Theory of Poker even has some suggestions as to how to randomize your play, like glancing at your watch and using the seconds to be a random number generator. That’s the book I’d recommend, by the way, if you want to understand more about the various elements that go into poker strategy. It’s not completely comprehensive, and it’s a bit outdated (and you’d be surprised how much the thinking about poker strategy has advanced since then) but it’s a good general purpose guide to understanding the sort of things that give poker depth.
Sure, though I’m not really all that interested in the arbitrary names of the states. From my perspective, as a programmer who has done some machine learning, to me this is just a game with some inputs representing a particular location on a finite state table of possible poker game states. I suspect that one of the more recently published openAI algorithms could solve poker without any game-specific information required. (you need a gym environment where you do have to score each hand and generate possible poker hands, however)
It is rather unfortunate that human players must use their limited and inaccurate grey matter to solve this game instead of being able to just look up the correct move to make off a Q-table or other automatically generated solution.
I don’t. To make a living playing poker requires a particular expertise and unique skills, as you have described. I suspect that there surely are other ways to apply them doing freelance work, though I would have to think about it more to give you a specific suggestion, (and you’ve probably considered a lot of them already, I imagine). I suppose for that kind of freelance work–that is, one that truly draws upon your unique skills–you would have to invest some time to get established in whatever job it is, and it probably won’t be one of the things that typically gets labeled as the “gig economy.” And maybe you’re not in the mood to put in such an investment.
In any case, it sounds to me like successful poker playing is something akin to “playing” the stock market successfully, in that you have to be able to see how things play out in the long-term, and apply well-founded principles consistently, despite temptations to do otherwise.
I deliver anywhere from 8-22 pizzas per 6 hour shift. Base pay for me in Indiana is 7.25 in house, $4.25 when out on delivery. Plus I get a .40 a mile reimbursement at the end of the shift for my miles driven.
My average tip in this very blue collar average town is about $4.50.
My brother played poker quite well. Not for a living, but he did make money at it.
How does he beat you? By convincing you that he has a better hand, among other methods. Being good at math helps, but you are not playing against a computer, so other factors are more important.
My brother used to go to Vegas for tournaments. He never played in the tournaments, he played the people who were early losers in the tournaments. This was quite profitable.
In poker, while the house takes a cut you are not playing a game where the house has odds in its favor.
Hi, I’m the other side of that Zero-Sum game. I lose most poker games I’m in*.
If I found myself travelling to Vegas for vacation or a conference, I would LOVE a casual evening (or afternoon) learning the basics of poker. And it’d be worth a hundred bucks or more. Especially from someone who’s been a “playah”, and could tell me “No no noooo, see what you did there? Don’t do that.” (My “that” is usually Staying In For Fun when a good player’d be folding half the time)
*Neighborhood guys. Low stakes, it’s actually a “beer, scotch and insults… oh, and poker” game.
ETA: Seriously, start some group lessons. The money spent on those would be less than what I’d lose at the tables, and judging by your posts, a lot more fun.
The esteemed SenorBeef already did a better job explaining this than I would have done, but I’d also point out it was a lot easier to do this when online poker was legal and popular and full of fish - you could play 4+ games at once at middling stakes where the skill level was low enough you could reliably make money, and having multiple games at once both increased your hourly win rate and decreased volatility.
At a casino, you can only play one game at a time so you have to play higher stakes and pick your table more carefully, the rake is higher, and your volatility is higher because of the higher stakes and fewer fresh faces coming to the table relative to online poker.
I got out a year or so after enough politicians were bought to declare online poker illegal in the US, because the state I lived in at the time didn’t have any casinos and the online scene dried up quite a bit without the US market feeding it. Even if I’d lived in Nevada, I hear in-person play also tightened up and got a lot more cut-throat, so I’ve no doubt SenorBeef is a better player than me if he was able to survive another decade in that milieu.
Anyone have personal experience with Task Rabbit? I was looking into it today and I had questions. I don’t want to be a driver (hate driving) exclusively, but I don’t mind doing errand type things at my own pace. So I know in theory there are errand type tasks available, but I didn’t know if they were a once in a blue moon thing or something you can make a couple hundred or so a week doing. To sign up as a person to do the tasks, you have to pay them $20, presumably for a background check. And you have to go to an in-person orientation. I don’t want to go through all that and log in my first day and find it’s all just “Come unclog my toilet” stuff. It’s totally worth the $20 if I MADE $20 easily in a couple hours, but if it’s too skilled for someone like me, it’s not.
I recently attended a talk given by Anand Giridharadas and Robert Reich on economic inequality. Anand G (Indo-American) said: in India, labor is so cheap that everyone with a good income has servants - cooks, housekeepers, drivers.
The “gig economy” is the Indification of America. We’re heading towards 2 classes: Uber drivers, and the people who can afford to take Uber.
When my business went south and I was looking for a job, I signed up for everything (Uber, Ubereats, Lyft, TaskRabbit, Instacart, Shipt, DoorDash,etc) but I ended up getting hired for a low wage hourly labor job and devoted my time (and overtime) to that instead.
I joined many many Facebook pages and groups and follow Youtube channels of people who do this fulltime and the best examples that I find don’t even make more than most entry level jobs that hire anyone. I get that some people desire “freedom” (though being a gig worker is technically an independent contractor thing, there is very little real “own your own business” type freedom IMHO) to an extreme, but it’s not really worth it to me if you are making minimum wage or less. In many cases the driving ones pay less. For example, in one of the groups last week a guy was bragging how he ran DoorDash for 106 hours and made $800. I average about $1000 working in a warehouse if I work 5 days a week. There are other people who make $250-300 a day running every app imaginable at one time and working all day long. Many of these people have their gig careers end when they can’t afford a basic car repair or some other minor inconvenience that does not happen when you have adequate earnings. Some of the top people I follow might profit $10/hr at the high end and have to deal with endless headaches from customers and 3rd party apps and customer service calls over order mistakes, restaurants that refuse to serve them, and so on.
I recently attended a talk given by Anand Giridharadas and Robert Reich on economic inequality. Anand G (Indo-American) said: in India, labor is so cheap that everyone with a good income has servants - cooks, housekeepers, drivers.
That statement doesn’t make sense. Pretty much anyone can afford to take an Uber. You might as well say "there are two classes of people - McDonalds workers and people who can afford to eat at McDonalds.
I have no idea how much Uber drivers make. But if they are paid so low, why are there so many of them or why don’t they find other service jobs in restaurants or bars or wherever that don’t require you to maintain an automobile?
Project Management lends itself to “gig” jobs as well. And it pays well. Anywhere from $40 to $100 an hour or more, depending on various factors like industry, location and experience.
Personally, I hate the whole “gig economy” mindset. Not every job lends itself to being an interchangeable cog in the corporate machinery and not everyone wants to or is cut out to constantly “hustle” looking for new gigs. That’s why you have a “company” in the first place. You have sales and marketing people who go out and look for work. You have technical people who are familiar with the products and can build or fix them as needed. Project and engagement managers who have built relationships, know how everything works and have executed similar projects on behalf of your company before.
I don’t know how many times I’ve seen companies do these large, complex engagements with a hodge podge of consultants and contractors from all sorts of firms and it turns into a giant clusterfuck.
It also doesn’t make sense in that in order to do Uber and Lyft, you have to have a relatively recent automobile, a smart phone, and a data plan. The true poor of the poor are not driving Ubers.
Doing Doordash, Uber, etc… it’s supposed to be a gig, a part-time thing. It’s not designed for people to try to make a living off it, it’s designed to provide supplemental income, and even then there are right ways and wrong ways to do it. I do it “right” (at least for me) - I do everything under my company, I am fairly aggressive on my tax deductions (because I pay for an accountant), I only work when it’s busy (pretty much nights and weekends - day driving sucks $-wise), I am heavily insured (see above re: deductions), I am able to write-off much of my car R&M expenses (see above re: deductions), I figured out how to average 20%+ of my income in tips, etc. All in all I earn $25/hour with a tax basis of around $3/hour. (That tip thing was huge - a few weekends ago, I made $700, $286 of it was tips.)
But most do it wrong - I’m probably 1 of a hundred drivers (at best) who even bothered to do all of the above, and even in the actual function of the job I can tell that there are drivers who don’t really get it: they sit for an hour at the airport, they work events, they think rush hour is a fantastic time to pick up people, they do crap like buy candy bars and drinks for their passengers ( :rolleyes: )… and the way they interact with the passengers, no wonder there are a lot of complaints.
So… while I have empathy, the fact remains that many of the people doing these gig jobs are just fucking doing it wrong. It’s supposed to provide supplemental income, not be the way you make your living, and there are ways to take advantage of the tax laws so that this supplemental income is largely tax-free.