Verifying Rationality via RationalPoker.com

Judging by this, it seems as though the best plan of all is to be the house.

And what will change for the victims when our hypothetical player, moved by your analysis, selflessly decides to refrain from taking part in the game? Pretty much nothing. And now think of all the poor, confused consequentialists who got caught in your blast of moral indignation.

very good at poker. Good enough to win (on average) $50/hr playing.

I would call that good, but not very good. Many poker players make an order of magnitude more, and that's without being one of the very best.

You may want to warn people that "a large amount of hands" means in the order of hundred thousand hands and more.

And to be more exact, variance only goes down relative to the expected winnings. The standard deviation of a sample increases as a square root to the number of hands. Whereas the expected winnings increases linearly. In Limit Hold'em, a 1,5BB/100 hands expected winrate just barely covers two standard deviations from the mean over 100,000 hands. Experienced player can perhaps play 4-6 tables simultaneously, which means that he can accumulate approximately 500 hands per hour. So 100,000 hands would take around 200 hours of play.

The real challenge of poker is dealing with the inherent variance of the game. The immense variance is the reason why poker is so profitable, but even the most experienced players are unable to cope with the most extreme swings of negative luck. The brain constantly tries to pattern-match the immediate results and however much you reason that it's just bad luck (when it really is bad luck!) it will make you sick psychologically.

Note that we assumed we know the expected winrate of a given player. However, conditions change, profitability of the games fluctuate, etc, so it's practically impossible to quantify any given player's current profitability. This makes it vastly more difficult to know whether bad past results are because of variance or because of sub-optimal play.

As someone in the midst of a 500 big blind downswing despite mostly getting it in with the best hand, I can confirm this :/. (And that's not even that bad of a downswing compared to what some people suffer).

Depends on what your luck attribute is. I'm well above average, both in life and the poker hands I get dealt.

(Yes, median Less Wrong user, this comment is a joke, mostly. You need to play a large amount of hands for your variance to go down to acceptable levels, especially with no limit poker).

Your third point about Ed Miller's book makes me think you missed the goal of our site. We're not exploring biases the way poker instruction typically does. Their method is, "Look at how biased your stupid opponents are! Hahaha! Here's how to exploit those chumps." Our point is "YOU are in every hand of poker you play -- so YOUR biases are the ones we need to focus on before we start worrying about the other players."

We fully expect to cover odds and statistics in upcoming posts. But we're writing The Sequences for Poker, not "another poker blog where we discuss our big hands from tournaments." Our feeling was that those things are covered well in other places but that the links between our own cognitive biases and poker have mostly been covered poorly or not at all... so this material is higher priority.

Also, if we follow your advice and craft our site to talk about how to grind SnGs and only discuss object level poker strategy, I agree, we would have lots of trouble differentiating ourselves. I think you're assuming that because this is how poker is presented on other sites. So your urging that we should change our style to be more like everyone else and then your follow-on concern that we will then not be able to differentiate ourselves is not just circular, but flawed logic. It ignores what our site is trying to do. We're not trying to be the most popular blog about SnG grinding instruction ever. Those sites are aimed at IQ100 frat-boys who don't care about being rational. They teach how to memorize a system (that a rational person created) and tell people to duplicate it as best as they can. It's no wonder that people who learn to play this way only have compartmentalized gains in "rational" behavior at the poker table.

We're explaining how to use poker for self-development in general. We're pointing out how poker can provide a training ground to learn about your biases in a way where you can actually notice and correct them. I think you'll enjoy the future posts as our series goes on. We will eventually incorporate more math and object-level discussion of poker into our curriculum as it continues.

It seems odd that you are criticizing the site for not replicating the specific hand discussion which is done so well elsewhere, while simultaneously wondering how we will differentiate.

Obviously, we will differentiate by not writing about the topics which are written about elsewhere ad nauseam, and instead add new thoughts, not often written about, and likely to be of interest to this audience - namely the connections between poker & becoming more rational. Perhaps these new thoughts are not as fundamental for learning how to win at poker, but they are different, and we believe, useful.

One of the things that troubles me about poker is that it seems like a major time sink and a deeply unhealthy lifestyle if you just want to calibrate yourself; but if you are interested in making some money as well or even making it your livelihood, it's still troubling because online poker is a negative expected sum game which is receiving a lot of media exposure.

I'm frankly confused about the whole issue of poker (both online and real-life). I know a lot of smart people who claim to have made ridiculous amounts of money playing poker casually in their free time. Judging from what they're saying, it would seem like there are so many suckers around playing for real money that a highly intelligent person willing to study the game can exercise a ridiculous amount of arbitrage.

But if I accept all their stories at face value, then why on Earth do all these smart people toil at difficult jobs for mediocre salaries when they could be earning much more money gambling? In particular, why do even all these people I know who boast about their earnings at poker still maintain difficult and demanding day jobs? (Of course, they can reply that gambling is only a short-term opportunity while the career is more important in the long run, but they could still invest more time in gambling while scaling down their careers temporarily with a clear net profit. And even if that's not possible, with such vast profit opportunities, one would expect they'd be playing far more even in their presently available free time.)

I don't know what to think of all this. Whatever the truth might be, either I know a bunch of otherwise honest and down to Earth people who are lying or delusional about this issue, or there is actually a screaming opportunity for making money on easy arbitrage that few people bother to exploit, and even they only partly and incompletely. Both possibilities seem to me highly implausible (but the latter more so).

One of the things that troubles me about poker is that it seems like a major time sink and a deeply unhealthy lifestyle if you just want to calibrate yourself.

It also sounds extremely boring. Then again, I also find video games and online multiplayer games equally boring, which could be a difference between me and the average LW poster...

2+2 is good by internet poker forum standards but the discussion there is only a touch above Fark or reddit. I don't imagine most people on LW could handle it.

Our hypothesis isn't that simple rationalism will lead to big wins. It's that rationalists have an above average chance of becoming a winning player compared to the average fraternity brother that makes it through Calculus II with a B, which I think is about the level of math competency needed to really succeed at poker. It's also that we can help professional poker players be slightly better players by getting them to read the LW sequences. We want to create new players from rationalists, and turn existing poker players into rationalists.

We are hoping that getting rationalists to try poker will make them more aware of their own emotional irrationality if they turn out to be losing players, and if they turn out to be winning players, so much the better. If we somehow convinced 50% of LW users to devote 10 hours a week to playing poker (yes median LW reader, I know this is unrealistic), I would be surprised if a year later we didn't have at least one person making in the mid six figures via semi-full time poker playing.

There's way more to being good at poker than reading the sequences, but it certainly makes for a good base level of understanding.

What specifically makes online poker illegal? I thought the popular interpretation of the Wire Act was that it only made the facilitation of gambling as a business enforcably illegal, and the more recent 2006 bill similarly did not apply to individual players.

I agree that the intent of the US government is to make individual gambling illegal, but that doesn't seem to be what legal precedent has actually established. And under the Obama administration the intent is less clear to me.

Hopefully the WTO gives the USA the slap it deserves in the next five years or so.

AFAIK playing online poker is NOT illegal in any state except Washington. What is illegal is for US financial institutions to conduct transactions with online gaming companies.

For a review see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_poker#Legality

Sure. We will totally be public about revenue generated, once the results are interesting enough to share. I'm expecting it to be a negligible amount until we hook a whale, that could generate thousands a month or more. If we don't say anything, assume it's because we're not making an interesting amount of money. The longer we're around, the higher our chances of hooking an existing big player or creating a new one.

I wish we could do this but playing without real money wouldn't work for improving rationality and I don't think it would even work for testing rationality in a meaningful way.

Also, I think this sets a good precedent. People who will bet on cards are far more likely to bet on their beliefs in general, which is a sign that they actually have beliefs as opposed to just "things they would like to be true". Not taking +EV bets that represent negligible portions of your net-worth is epistemically irrational so it seems like a rationalist community should be encouraging betting when it is done at reasonable stakes as a way to train or test beliefs.

PokerStrategy.com provides you with a $50 starting capital if you pass their quiz.

I've done this; I now have ca. 500$ without ever cashing in, but it took quite some time.

the feedback is NOT immediate.

This can not be said too often, the variance is quite high and it takes a lot of self-control to play consistently even if you've been losing money for a long time.

www.instantbankroll.com also does this.

They're not very good at analyzing the context, but sure, there are lots of assistant programs. Especially recommended are so-called HUDs (they overimpose real-time updated statistics on your opponents on the screen), that these days tend to be included in more general poker analytics software suites such as Hold'Em Manager.

In general, if you people have questions regarding how to play poker, it's better to ask on a poker forum than here. (TwoPlusTwo is still the biggest and best, I think.)

I haven't tried day trading, but I'd be very surprised if it's easier than poker.

There is a huge number of very silly people playing online poker (so it's very easy to beat them).

you should join me at my house in Berkeley while we all play

I hope you'll make sure not to engage in collusion prohibited by the rules of the site.

Did you indeed try out online poker, and if so, how did it go?

Poker allows you to gamble for as little or as much as you want; Poker Stars has games where the stakes are $0.01/$0.02 and no one sits down with more than a dollar, and the game is low quality but real. Most sites have very low stakes games that are similar. If you want to experiment with little risk, that is one good way to do it.

Where did that belief that you would go broke very quickly come from? It seems, if you'll forgive me, a little irrational. If you improve your rationality and knowledge of basic probability to the point where it exceeds that of the average at the table you are playing at, you will (on average) make money.

Unlike sports. where height, reflexes and hand-eye coordination play such a huge factor, there is no intrinsic poker ability. Those who are "naturally" good at poker are simply those who are already more rational, at least in their playing of poker, and have a better prior knowledge (understanding may be a better word than knowledge, as most people do not take time to actually do the calculations) of the probabilities.

I think this is a great idea, though I do caution that people spend a little time practising with free games, or low stakes ones at least, as it can take a few games to get the hang of betting, and to get an intuitive understanding of the probabilities, as you will most likely not have time to calculate them while the game is being played.

The chance (pun intended) to make money off of rationality while doing something enjoyable and practising that rationality is simply too good to pass up.

That's a good point... I guess the cheating scandal was not something where they looked better at the end of it? I'll update the links tomorrow. Any sites you recommend instead?

Our intention is that the would be rake back goes to charity, but rake back is negotiable.

For the most part, programming a bot is a lot harder than just learning how to play and playing yourself, no matter how good you are at programming.

How much professional poker players make varies a lot according to their skill level. The best reliably make millions every year.

Setting up a bot to play for you is a winning strategy, but ethically questionable since it requires breaking the rules of the site. And a necessary non-trivial part of the strategy would be evading the detection they engage in.

For demonstrating the value of the LW-style rationalism skill set, it seems better to you can use it for any mental-skill based game (including poker, chess, life itself even) -- after all, winning in a game, carefully designed to reward certain behaviours does not show us much about these behaviours.

Still, indeed it would be interesting to see some game to train these skills. One thing I'd be particularly interested in to train my skills in making quick yet somewhat accurate probability estimations, and update them when new information arrives.

Another area could be various logical fallacies and cognitive biases - some game that teaches the fine balance between bias-avoidance and bias-overcompensation.

Well, if you can explain every outcome, you have zero knowledge. And your ignorance about Eliezer Yudkowsky is a fact about you, not a fact about Eliezer Yudkowsky. :-)

Bots only win at 1v1 limit poker. No bot can play professional no-limit poker, especially at a full table.

Again, the best humans are much, much better at poker than the best bots. The idea that optimal NL poker is computationally solvable and not demanding is just wrong. No one has solved it yet.

I'm dubious of the idea that I should be training mentally in an area that a computer program can already trounce all humans in. Playing optimal poker is computationally solvable and not demanding, except for figuring out the biases of the human players.

You obviously have very little knowledge of the topic you're presenting yourself as an expert on.

Do professional poker players make most of their money playing against rubes, or against other professionals?

As is a logical necessity, most make their money off of non-professionals. The very best probably make more off of other professionals, though there are some very bad players even at the highest stakes (e.g. billionaires who just like poker).

Is any of the money counted as their earnings prize money contributed by sponsors, or advertising sponsorships?

There isn't good public data on sponsorship deals. When one hears how much a particular professional makes, they are seldom included.

What are the arguments that a human can outplay a computer at poker?

The fact that you don't see computers beating the best humans (except in some somewhat marginal forms of poker, and even there it's debatable), and in most forms of poker, not even the semi-good players.

This isn't a matter of "argument", but a matter of observing the facts.

How is poker more useful than practicing multiplying large numbers together?

You don't usually get money for simple multiplication.

That's mentioned in the article and they claim (believably as far as I am concerned) the proceeds go to the SIAI.

Another term for font smoothing (mentioned by Kevin) is antialiasing. Try a different browser as well -- perhaps compare to IE or Chrome. Also, you could check out THIS? I run linux, but that's what my quick web search got me.

Edit: I can't tell if that is Vista or 7... I assumed 7 but maybe I was wrong. Just search around for font-smooting or anti-alias settings or whatever Win version you run and you should find some help.

It's just you... I believe it wouldn't look awful if you had font smoothing turned on. I'm running Windows with standard, non-subpixel font smoothing and it looks fine. Do you have font smoothing turned completely off? You might want to try standard smoothing. I think there is some sort of broader problem you are having with fonts though. I previously remember have that problem on some sites and have no idea what caused it and why I don't see it anymore.