From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Tue Oct 29 2002 - 17:34:35 MST
> > I thought Emlyn's estimate was rather ingenious, but no, it didn't
> > take that into account nor were his numbers exact, but it was an
> > interesting shortcut approach that gets damn close to the right
> > answer with a lot less work. I guess those of us who are spoiled
> > on spreadsheets and Monte-Carlo programs get lazy and fail to think
> > of creative shortcuts like that.
>
> LOL! I thought that your method was ingenious, and mine was just a dumb
> brute force approach. I wouldn't have called it creative; just the most
> obvious method to a programmer.
Well, I'm a programmer, and I didn't think about breaking up the
distribution into equiprobable pairs and then applying Bayes--I just
did the brute force count 'em all and add 'em up. But then, I've
been a poker player for as long as I've been a programmer, so I'm
used to just adding up all the possibilities.
An interesting aside from the world of Poker: in the first few
years of the World Series of Poker, high-stakes poker was dominated
by old-school "intuition" gamblers like Johnny Moss, "Texas Dolly"
Brunson, "Amarillo Slim" Preston, "Puggy" Pearson, and a other
"road gamblers" who didn't know a binomial distribution from a
binary star, but could look a man in the eyes and know how he felt
about his hand, and had good enough "card sense" to make seat-of-
the-pants probability estimates that were close enough to make
lots of money (and who were smart enough to hire math nerds to
figure out the exact odds they realized they needed to know).
After the money started growing, the poker scene was invaded by
math nerds. Folks like Chris Ferguson and Phil Hellmuth who play
over e-mail and will argue on the net for days over whether or not
it's profitable to open with Ace-Jack in eighth position in a
ten-handed game with 5 and 10 blinds, and who will show printouts
from a simulator program to make their case. This is my crowd.
Last year, a European casino sponsored a world "heads-up" poker
championship. "Heads up" means one-on-one: at every stage in
the tournament, each player plays against only one other player
in single-elimination. The two start with an equal stake, and
whichever one winds up with all of it moves on to the next
round, no second chances. This is a game that doesn't emphasize
knowing complex odds. Everybody already knows what all the odds
are heads-up, because those have been calculated long ago and are
in every book. So this game is one of straight one-on-one balls.
It was no surprize to me that the final included Amarillo Slim,
at the age of 73, who hadn't won a regular tournament in nearly
20 years (alas, he didn't win this one either, but second place
was good for a sum that would pay off my house).
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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