Item — HN Reader

I'm surprised at the general tone of response here towards the subject of poker overall (I didn't read the article yet so perhaps something more is in the context, but all the same); I understand there are many in the poker world even regarding the most successful of whom are regarded as living a degenerate lifestyle, but being that I was previously in that world myself and was not a degenerate type; I never gambled outside of "my game" that I had an edge in, I learned and implemented proper bankroll management and I studied the game on fundamental levels and on up, progressing into the meta-psyche game that is NL heads-up.

Which brings me to my point which is that while some forms of poker have proven "beatable" by ai, certain forms ie; short-handed tables of NL Holdem, increase in perpexlity to a point where, in heads-up, there are too many variables at play both "physically" (the cards and corresponding hand ranks) and metaphysically (the story being implied thru the route of actions taken at each street from preflop, flop, turn, to river) for there to exist some perfect approach against a skilled player.

NL Holdem poker is absolutely a game of skill with an element of variance aka luck/lack-there-of.

6 comments

The teachings from the games of gambling, probability etc is a valuable life skill that far too few people have.

I reccomend:

Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts Hardcover – 6 Feb. 2018 by Annie Duke

Or listen to any of the podcasts she did when promoting the book - Peter Attia or Masters of Business are the two I presonally consumed at that time.

I mention this in threads/replies below:

It's a warped puritanism.

I agree with everything you've said, and I think we'd have better politics, economics, human relationships and fun, if more people got their heads out of their posteriors and actually understood poker more.

It's kinda disgusting that people have such a visceral reaction.

Also used to be in that world and identify similarly in terms of my lack of love for gambling.

I'd suggest that you're empirically incorrect in saying that there is no perfect approach against a skilled player (6handed games which often reduce to a single heads-up interactions by showdown):

1. we know that a Nash equilibrium exists for every two-player zero-sum game such that it’s mathematically unexploitable

2. Pluribus approximated the Nash well enough (didn’t have to search over 10^161 possibilities) to crush high stakes skilled player over a good run of hands

> NL Holdem poker is absolutely a game of skill with an element of variance aka luck/lack-there-of.

I’ve played a lot of Holdem, and I’m not sure I agree. A lot of what passes for skill is just an innate understanding of the odds.

John Scarne writes about gambling that a good bet isn’t one you are likely to win, but one where the payout is enough to be worth the risk. The best players know the odds of pulling a straight and can do math to figure out if it’s worth chasing one.

Also known as Expected Value (EV), as in, how much is in the pot right now compared to how much you’re betting/calling, usually compared to how likely you are to win a hand using the cards you’re holding.

That works well for limit games, where you can’t bet more than a set amount (in relation to the blinds or the current pot), especially when there are multiple people at the table, and you’re in an advantageous late position so others act before you do.

In high-stakes no-limit heads-up (1v1) play, the cards you’re holding matter less, especially before the flop. EV and pot odds are almost useless except for gauging when to bluff / if you’re being bluffed. Hands rarely end in a showdown as opposed to one of the players folding. The hands that do are essentially coin-flips, with both players holding what they believe are strong hands.

I think this is true and why programs like like Pluribus, Libratus and DeepStack have outperformed professionals in both heads-up and multiplayer no-limit Texas Hold'em. It's not reading social cues like traditional players, but just relying on probability. Even when giving perfect knowledge of the computer strategy to humans, they're still unable to exploit.

Humans are improving their game by using solvers and introducing randomness into their decisions. For instance, an optimal strategy given a hand might be "fold 80% of the time". One way to do that in live play is look at the second hand of a watch and fold unless it seconds (in this case) are about 48 (80% prob).

You're not wrong that knowing the odds is a component of the skill, but to suggest that skill in poker stops there is minimizing many of the advanced aspects that require playing at a higher level (information management, assessing a player's likely range, determining the equity of a player's range with cards to come, realizing when your or their range is capped, etc)

> I’ve played a lot of Holdem, and I’m not sure I agree. A lot of what passes for skill is just an innate understanding of the odds.

"The odds", however, are not simply a function of the cards in your hand and the unknown cards in the deck. There are also the cards in other people's hands, and getting a good read on what they may be based on the person's behavior is absolutely a skill.

It's always entertaining to play poker with 1 friend who is very skilled at a table full of novices. They often get frustrated and crash out due to their read on other people's behavior being miscalibrated to the situation.

> It's always entertaining to play poker with 1 friend who is very skilled at a table full of novices. They often get frustrated and crash out due to their read on other people's behavior being miscalibrated to the situation.

The most frustrating poker game I play is the monthly Saturday Night game with the bros where they're mostly drinking and watching sports, and none of them are very good or play regularly in casinos.

You can usually get a good read on people who are decent-to-good players, playing in a casino. Their bets will generally make sense and tell a believable story (whether or not they are bluffing). You can mostly tell when they are playing ABC poker vs. getting out of line or making moves. People's bet sizing, their approach to pot management, their ranges, their play style, tight vs. loose, passive vs. aggressive, tend to be identifiable. In other words, players tend to act in ways you'd expect from poker players who have played 10,000 hands.

The Saturday Night amateur gang don't play in ways that make sense or are classifiable. You can't tell what their range is, because they don't even know what a range is. Their betting lines don't make sense because they aren't poker players, and often aren't even paying attention to the current hand. You really have to play these kinds of games differently, and/or just relax and consider it a night of drinking and random bingo instead of poker.

Hey I've started playing poker occasionally again, wanna have a chat about poker? My email is in my profile.

I used to be a winning player at small stakes about 20 years ago, so nothing major but enough for me to show that it's a game of skill.

But yea, for anyone interested why poker is a game of skill, it's due to the law of large numbers. You can easily see the law kick into effect when you simulate a dice roll and you win from 1 to 4 and the other wins 5 to 6 and you both get $1 if you win. I recently had to explain this concept so I happen to have the JS still lying around in my Chrome console.

  const rolls = 10_000;
  let a = 0;
  let b = 0;
  
  for (let i = 0; i < rolls; i++) {
    const die = Math.ceil(Math.random() * 6); // 1–6
    if (die <= 4) a++;
    else b++;
  }
  
  console.log(`Player A wins: $${a}`);
  console.log(`Player B wins: $${b}`);
  console.log(`Total paid out: $${a + b}`);
  console.log(`A's edge per game: ${(a - b) / rolls}`);
  console.log(`Difference: ${(a - b)}`);

Poker has much, much higher variance than dice though (or weighted coins, which is what you're actually modeling). It takes hundreds of thousands of hands to establish a statistically significant win rate.

At a common online pace of 1.5 hands per minute (live games are much slower) that's over a thousand hours of playing. I.e. even if playing for one hour every day, it takes years before a player knows whether they're profitable or not.

Seems disingenious to compare to dice when you presumably know poker belongs to that class of distributions to which the central limit theorem applies very slowly.

Your proof to poker being a game based on skill is a simulation of weighted dice?

> I'm surprised at the general tone of response here towards the subject of poker overall [...] regarded as living a degenerate lifestyle

Maybe the people who are negative have read to the end of the article where we are let into the not-so-hidden agenda of the parent: Teach the kids to hustle their way through college so they can become a market speculator.

Matt Levine is “known for his humorous, witty, deadpan writing style” - I’m pretty sure that’s a joke.

I think it was at least partially joke. The author writes a popular newsletter called "Money Stuff", which is about weird things in the finance world.