I have just started playing poker online. On Less Wrong Discussion, Poker has been called an exercise in instrumental rationality, and a so-called Rationality Dojo was opened via RationalPoker.com. I have perused this site, but it has been dormant since July 2011. Other sources exist, such as 2 + 2, Pokerology and Play Winning Poker, but none of them have the quality of content or style that I have found on Less Wrong. Is anyone here a serious poker player? Is there any advice for someone who wants to become a winning player themselves?
What is your goal? If you want to earn significantly more than (let’s say) $20,000 a year then poker is probably not your best bet. I used to play during 2007-2010 and the game were getting progressively tougher (more regulars, less fish), the same way as they had been in the prior few years before I started playing online. I recently checked how things are going and the trend seems to still be in place. Additionally, the segregation of countries in online poker (americans not being able to play with non-americans for example) is making things worse and this is in fact what drove me away mid-2010.
TL;DR You are several years too late to have a decent chance of making good money with poker.
Thank you for the heads up. I’ll keep it to more causal play. Do you have any experience to with brick and mortar poker? And what are you doing now if you are no longer (presumably) playing professionally?
Do you have any experience to with brick and mortar poker?
There are more fish live, sure. However since you can only play one table at a time and since you can only do about 30 hands a table, you will need to play at higher stakes and have a big enough bankroll.
And what are you doing now if you are no longer (presumably) playing professionally?
For the record I wasn’t making really big money back then or anything either (decent enough for the country I used to live in but that’s it). I work now and if you are looking for job advice, the ‘obvious’ one is programming.
Aside: Poker and rationality aren’t close to excellently correlated. (Poker and math is a stronger bond.) Poker players tend to be very good at probabilities, but their personal lives can show a striking lack of rationality.
To the point: I don’t play poker online because it’s illegal in the US. I play live four days a year in Las Vegas. (I did play more in the past.)
I’m significantly up. I am reasonably sure I could make a living wage playing poker professionally. Unfortunately, the benefits package isn’t very good, I like my current job, and I am too old to play the 16-hour days of my youth.
General tips: Play a lot. To the extent that you can, keep track of your results. You need surprisingly large sample sizes to determine whether your really a winner unless you have a signature performance. (If you win three 70-person tournaments in a row, you are better than that class of player.) No-limit hold-‘em (my game of choice) is a game where you can win or lose based on a luck a lot of the time. Skill will win out over very long periods of time, but don’t get too cocky or depressed over a few days’ work.
Try to keep track of those things you did that were wrong at the time. If you got all your chips in pre-flop with AA, you were right even if someone else hits something and those chips are now gone. This is the first-order approximation.
Play a lot, and try to get better. If you are regularly losing over a significant period of time, you are doing something wrong. Do not blame the stupid players for making random results. (That is a sign of the permaloser.)
Know the pot math. Know that all money in the pot is the same; your pot-money amount doesn’t matter. Determine your goals: Do you want to fish-hunt (find weak games, kill them) or are you playing for some different goal? Maybe it’s more fun to play stronger players. Plus, you can better faster against stronger players, if you have enough money.
Finally, don’t be a jerk. Poker players are generally decent humans at the table in my experience. Being a jerk is unpleasant, and people will be gunning for you. It is almost always easier to take someone’s money when they are not fully focused on beating you. Also, it’s nicer. Don’t (in live games) slow-roll, give lessons, chirp at people, bark at the dealer, or any of that. Poker is a fun hobby.
Poker and rationality aren’t close to excellently correlated. (Poker and math is a stronger bond.) Poker players tend to be very good at probabilities, but their personal lives can show a striking lack of rationality.
Poker teaches only a couple of significant rationality skills (playing according to probabilities even when you don’t intuitively want to; beating the sunk-cost fallacy and loss aversion), but it’s very good at teaching those if approached with the right mindset. It also gives you a good head for simple probability math, and if played live makes for good training in reading people, but that doesn’t convert to fully general rationality skills without some additional work.
I’d call it more a rationality drill than a rationality exercise, but I do see the correlation.
(As qualifications go, I successfully played poker [primarily mid-limit hold ’em] online before it was banned in the States. I’ve also funded my occasional Vegas trips with live games, although that’s like taking candy from a baby as long as you stay sober—tourists at the low-limit tables are fantastically easy to rip off.)
Poker also requires the skill of identifying and avoiding tilt, the state of being emotionally charged leading to the sacrifice of good decision-making. A nice look of the baises which need to be reduce to play effective poker can be found at Rationalpoker.com.
I suppose poker is more of a rationality drill than exercise, and just a physicist may be successful in his field while having a broken personal life, so may a poker player fall to the same trap.
Excellent post. Thank you for the detailed response.
Right now, I have been struggling with calculating pot odds and implied odds. I grasp what they are conceptually, but actually calculating them has been a bust thus far. Is there any guidence you could give with this?
As far as legality in the US, I am playing in the state of Delaware with one of thier licensed sites, so I think I am in the clear. The play is very thin though, and I am looking to make my way to the brick and mortars in Alantic City to see if it will be a good sandbox to become better.
I have just started playing poker online. On Less Wrong Discussion, Poker has been called an exercise in instrumental rationality, and a so-called Rationality Dojo was opened via RationalPoker.com. I have perused this site, but it has been dormant since July 2011. Other sources exist, such as 2 + 2, Pokerology and Play Winning Poker, but none of them have the quality of content or style that I have found on Less Wrong. Is anyone here a serious poker player? Is there any advice for someone who wants to become a winning player themselves?
What is your goal? If you want to earn significantly more than (let’s say) $20,000 a year then poker is probably not your best bet. I used to play during 2007-2010 and the game were getting progressively tougher (more regulars, less fish), the same way as they had been in the prior few years before I started playing online. I recently checked how things are going and the trend seems to still be in place. Additionally, the segregation of countries in online poker (americans not being able to play with non-americans for example) is making things worse and this is in fact what drove me away mid-2010.
TL;DR You are several years too late to have a decent chance of making good money with poker.
Thank you for the heads up. I’ll keep it to more causal play. Do you have any experience to with brick and mortar poker? And what are you doing now if you are no longer (presumably) playing professionally?
There are more fish live, sure. However since you can only play one table at a time and since you can only do about 30 hands a table, you will need to play at higher stakes and have a big enough bankroll.
For the record I wasn’t making really big money back then or anything either (decent enough for the country I used to live in but that’s it). I work now and if you are looking for job advice, the ‘obvious’ one is programming.
Aside: Poker and rationality aren’t close to excellently correlated. (Poker and math is a stronger bond.) Poker players tend to be very good at probabilities, but their personal lives can show a striking lack of rationality.
To the point: I don’t play poker online because it’s illegal in the US. I play live four days a year in Las Vegas. (I did play more in the past.)
I’m significantly up. I am reasonably sure I could make a living wage playing poker professionally. Unfortunately, the benefits package isn’t very good, I like my current job, and I am too old to play the 16-hour days of my youth.
General tips: Play a lot. To the extent that you can, keep track of your results. You need surprisingly large sample sizes to determine whether your really a winner unless you have a signature performance. (If you win three 70-person tournaments in a row, you are better than that class of player.) No-limit hold-‘em (my game of choice) is a game where you can win or lose based on a luck a lot of the time. Skill will win out over very long periods of time, but don’t get too cocky or depressed over a few days’ work.
Try to keep track of those things you did that were wrong at the time. If you got all your chips in pre-flop with AA, you were right even if someone else hits something and those chips are now gone. This is the first-order approximation.
Play a lot, and try to get better. If you are regularly losing over a significant period of time, you are doing something wrong. Do not blame the stupid players for making random results. (That is a sign of the permaloser.)
Know the pot math. Know that all money in the pot is the same; your pot-money amount doesn’t matter. Determine your goals: Do you want to fish-hunt (find weak games, kill them) or are you playing for some different goal? Maybe it’s more fun to play stronger players. Plus, you can better faster against stronger players, if you have enough money.
Finally, don’t be a jerk. Poker players are generally decent humans at the table in my experience. Being a jerk is unpleasant, and people will be gunning for you. It is almost always easier to take someone’s money when they are not fully focused on beating you. Also, it’s nicer. Don’t (in live games) slow-roll, give lessons, chirp at people, bark at the dealer, or any of that. Poker is a fun hobby.
Poker teaches only a couple of significant rationality skills (playing according to probabilities even when you don’t intuitively want to; beating the sunk-cost fallacy and loss aversion), but it’s very good at teaching those if approached with the right mindset. It also gives you a good head for simple probability math, and if played live makes for good training in reading people, but that doesn’t convert to fully general rationality skills without some additional work.
I’d call it more a rationality drill than a rationality exercise, but I do see the correlation.
(As qualifications go, I successfully played poker [primarily mid-limit hold ’em] online before it was banned in the States. I’ve also funded my occasional Vegas trips with live games, although that’s like taking candy from a baby as long as you stay sober—tourists at the low-limit tables are fantastically easy to rip off.)
Poker also requires the skill of identifying and avoiding tilt, the state of being emotionally charged leading to the sacrifice of good decision-making. A nice look of the baises which need to be reduce to play effective poker can be found at Rationalpoker.com.
I suppose poker is more of a rationality drill than exercise, and just a physicist may be successful in his field while having a broken personal life, so may a poker player fall to the same trap.
Excellent post. Thank you for the detailed response.
Right now, I have been struggling with calculating pot odds and implied odds. I grasp what they are conceptually, but actually calculating them has been a bust thus far. Is there any guidence you could give with this?
As far as legality in the US, I am playing in the state of Delaware with one of thier licensed sites, so I think I am in the clear. The play is very thin though, and I am looking to make my way to the brick and mortars in Alantic City to see if it will be a good sandbox to become better.