toner
I’ll come but will probably be a bit late.
Many jobs, including almost all of those that people would do on a working holiday, have Award rates higher than the minimum wage. Effectively, in Australia the minimum wage depends on the job. $21 is probably the minimum allowed by whatever Award governs shokwave’s employment, either the Fast Food Industry Award or KFC might have their own enterprise agreement.
If anyone cares, the place to learn about this is here.
I’ll come.
I agree, start with no limit hold’em because there’s an awful lot of good learning material about it and the games at low limits are pretty good, but at some point consider switching to pot limit omaha.
I think most online sites are 18+.
Most people use databases and heads-up displays, but to calculate and present statistics about your own and your opponents’ play, not to calculate odds (calculating odds is easy). I like Poker Tracker.
Read some of the books published by Two Plus Two for solid beginner information that’s mostly a little out of date; then sign up at a video training site (I like Deuces Cracked) for up-to-date information; finally go, e.g., here and accept one of the offers where they give you free money to play with and then use their money to practice at 1 cent/2 cent games.
Also, maybe ask this question at the Two Plus Two forums for a better response.
Go ahead! But it’s hard.
I hear that everywhere too. It’s a selection effect: most of the population aren’t smart and rational enough to be long-term winning players and it’s these people you hear complaining, while the good players go on quietly winning.
It’s definitely true that the games are getting tougher every year, because the community is learning to play better, so the threshold of ability you need to be a winning player is constantly increasing. But it’s not that high yet.
Now let’s talk about your two bugbears, bots and collusion.
1. Bots
You never ever have to worry about bots. The goal in poker is to seek out and play against bad players, while tolerating the presence of good players. It’s completely irrelevant whether these players are controlled by humans, machines, or some combination. (In practice, except possibly for heads-up limit hold’em, good players are still better than the best bots published in the academic literature anyway.)
2. Collusion
This is something you have to worry about, but in practice it’s not that big a deal, especially if you play at low limits, where it’s not going to be worth the bother for competent players to collude. There have been only a handful of times when I’ve suspected collusion online, in which case, the obvious response was to stop playing against those players. Sometimes collusion can be detected statistically, but if some collusion does go undetected, as long as you’re winning, what does it matter?
If you’re truly smart, truly rational, and with the goal function you describe in your post, an obvious answer is to play poker on the internet. But beware: if it turns out you’re not actually as rational as most of us on Less Wrong think we are, it probably won’t work out.
Thank you for organising this. I’ll come. It’s a good choice of venue.
Surely this is illegal in the US. First you’re acting like a bank by taking deposits and paying interest, and probably you have to actually be a bank to do that; second you’re setting yourself up as a bookmaker.
Design suggestion:
All the meta stuff associated with a comment, viz.
Posted by: Kaj_Sotala 02 March 2009 09:32:50AM 2 points Vote up | Vote down | Permalink | Parent | Report | Reply
takes up a lot of space and impedes readability of the discussion. Can all this stuff be made smaller and less prominent (maybe more like it is on Hacker News) and perhaps some of the links only be visible when you’re in the actual comment’s thread (like the “Flag” feature is on Hacker News)? (Also we don’t really need to know the exact second that a post is made.)
Thanks for organizing this Adam, I enjoyed it!
There was a strong consensus that we wanted to keep meeting, and I made a google group for us to plan activities, discuss what sorts of things we might like to do in the future, let each other know of interesting events, and so on.
At the moment the group is semi-private, meaning that only members can view content but anyone can join. There is no moderation. We can change this if there is a consensus to do so or as it becomes necessary.
I’ll make AdamBell, Patrick (who organized the previous meetups) and matt admins, unless they object.
If you’re in Melbourne, please join and perhaps introduce yourself!
http://groups.google.com/group/melbourne-less-wrong/