“If you are playing with a player who thinks that “all reds” is a strong hand, it can take you many, many hands to figure out that they’re overestimating their hands instead of just getting anomalously lucky with their hidden cards while everyone else folds!”
As you guessed, this is wrong. If someone is playing a lot of hands, your first hypothesis is that they are too loose and making mistakes. At that point, each additional hand they play is evidence in favor of fishiness, and you can quickly become confident that they are bad.
Mistakes in the other direction are much harder to detect. If someone folds for 30 minutes, they plausibly just had a bad run of cards. We’ve all been there. They do have some discipline, but because folding is so common, each additional fold only adds a small bit of is Bayesian evidence that the person is a rock.
That all sounds right, but I want to invert your setup.
If someone is playing too many hands, your first hypothesis is that they are too loose and making mistakes. If someone folds for 30 minutes, then steals the blinds once, then folds some more, you will have a hard time telling whether they’re playing wrong or have had a bad run of cards.
But in either case, it is going to be significantly harder for them to tell, from inside their own still-developing understanding of the game, whether the things that are happening to them are evidence about their own mistakes or anomalous luck or just the way the game is. Even more so if their opponents are playing something close to GTO rather than playing way-off-equilibrium exploits.
And, from a pedagogical perspective, the thing that I am usually trying to optimize for as a teacher is whether the game teaches itself to a student who is still largely confused—not whether the game can be appreciated by a student who has already reached a level of understanding of the concepts it’s being used to teach.
“If you are playing with a player who thinks that “all reds” is a strong hand, it can take you many, many hands to figure out that they’re overestimating their hands instead of just getting anomalously lucky with their hidden cards while everyone else folds!”
As you guessed, this is wrong. If someone is playing a lot of hands, your first hypothesis is that they are too loose and making mistakes. At that point, each additional hand they play is evidence in favor of fishiness, and you can quickly become confident that they are bad.
Mistakes in the other direction are much harder to detect. If someone folds for 30 minutes, they plausibly just had a bad run of cards. We’ve all been there. They do have some discipline, but because folding is so common, each additional fold only adds a small bit of is Bayesian evidence that the person is a rock.
That all sounds right, but I want to invert your setup.
If someone is playing too many hands, your first hypothesis is that they are too loose and making mistakes. If someone folds for 30 minutes, then steals the blinds once, then folds some more, you will have a hard time telling whether they’re playing wrong or have had a bad run of cards.
But in either case, it is going to be significantly harder for them to tell, from inside their own still-developing understanding of the game, whether the things that are happening to them are evidence about their own mistakes or anomalous luck or just the way the game is. Even more so if their opponents are playing something close to GTO rather than playing way-off-equilibrium exploits.
And, from a pedagogical perspective, the thing that I am usually trying to optimize for as a teacher is whether the game teaches itself to a student who is still largely confused—not whether the game can be appreciated by a student who has already reached a level of understanding of the concepts it’s being used to teach.