Variance
Current Roll: $5515.
After hitting a low of $5300, I hope my losing streak is over. A few days of losses really helped me understand why there are so many so skeptical of 'those going pro' on RGP. Fortunately I have a grad student stipend I can pay rent and food on, but I am starting to like the extra income. Sometime I will write on my grad student friends' opinions of my online poker playing.
There's a lot of confusion on probability and statistics, and particularily their applications to poker. In fact, humans in general have a difficult time intuitively understanding statistics, probability, randomness.
Varience in particular; humans learn from feedback. If we push hands that only have a 40% chance of winning against 4 opponents, we make money in the long run but will most likely lose it in the short run. Or if we have a 40% chance of winning against one opponent, it is very likely that we will win money in the short run. This inverse feedback - winning from bad plays and losing from good plays, makes poker an incredibly hard game to learn. In fact, the pattern of winning and losing based purely on long term odds is nearly impossible to see without some statistical tools over samples of tens of thousands of hands.
Since humans learn from feedback and the feedback from poker has a lot of randomness, this means that we have difficulty learning good, long term poker habits mearly from experience. If you read rec.gambling.poker. you will see that many people have all sorts of superstitions and beliefs directly contradicting statistical laws, and they gained these theories from personal, everday experience. This is why the statistical formulations are so important - they skip the experience step and allow us to play winning poker for the long run.
The other human reaction is internal / external attribution of feedback. Winning streaks are attributed internally; people feel they win because they are good players. Whereas losing streaks are attributed externally; bad cards, someone else is incredibly lucky, online sites are rigged, etc. The thing is, it's very difficult to assses, in the short run, whether the wins or loses are coming from playing well or not.
Many terrible players think they are good because they have had some short run winning streaks and come up with external explanations for their losses. They have difficulty seeing that they are playing poorly in the long run. And for you and me, this is only a good thing, because it keeps them in the game.
Of course, there's a lot more to poker than blind statistics. But it's certainly a start that will put you ahead of the nearly all 2/4 players.
After hitting a low of $5300, I hope my losing streak is over. A few days of losses really helped me understand why there are so many so skeptical of 'those going pro' on RGP. Fortunately I have a grad student stipend I can pay rent and food on, but I am starting to like the extra income. Sometime I will write on my grad student friends' opinions of my online poker playing.
There's a lot of confusion on probability and statistics, and particularily their applications to poker. In fact, humans in general have a difficult time intuitively understanding statistics, probability, randomness.
Varience in particular; humans learn from feedback. If we push hands that only have a 40% chance of winning against 4 opponents, we make money in the long run but will most likely lose it in the short run. Or if we have a 40% chance of winning against one opponent, it is very likely that we will win money in the short run. This inverse feedback - winning from bad plays and losing from good plays, makes poker an incredibly hard game to learn. In fact, the pattern of winning and losing based purely on long term odds is nearly impossible to see without some statistical tools over samples of tens of thousands of hands.
Since humans learn from feedback and the feedback from poker has a lot of randomness, this means that we have difficulty learning good, long term poker habits mearly from experience. If you read rec.gambling.poker. you will see that many people have all sorts of superstitions and beliefs directly contradicting statistical laws, and they gained these theories from personal, everday experience. This is why the statistical formulations are so important - they skip the experience step and allow us to play winning poker for the long run.
The other human reaction is internal / external attribution of feedback. Winning streaks are attributed internally; people feel they win because they are good players. Whereas losing streaks are attributed externally; bad cards, someone else is incredibly lucky, online sites are rigged, etc. The thing is, it's very difficult to assses, in the short run, whether the wins or loses are coming from playing well or not.
Many terrible players think they are good because they have had some short run winning streaks and come up with external explanations for their losses. They have difficulty seeing that they are playing poorly in the long run. And for you and me, this is only a good thing, because it keeps them in the game.
Of course, there's a lot more to poker than blind statistics. But it's certainly a start that will put you ahead of the nearly all 2/4 players.
posted by mike at 8:21 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home