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Apprentice comments on Rationality Lessons in the Game of Go - Less Wrong
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I don't doubt that there are lots of rationality lessons in deterministic games like Go. But I think in some ways they crucially misrepresent life. When you've lost a game in Go you can always think:
"I lost because I didn't play well enough."
In games with a random element, like poker, you have to think:
"I lost because I didn't play well enough AND/OR because I was unlucky."
To become good at poker it's crucial to be able to distinguish between bad luck and play mistakes. You have to keep your cool when your opponent makes bad moves and wins anyway. You have to be able to think thoughts like this:
"That the card on top of the deck should have happened to be the only one that would let my opponent win the game is not evidence I should update on. It tells me nothing I didn't already know. It's just that Nature felt like slapping me in the face right now and there's nothing I can do about it. She'll wipe the grin off my opponent soon enough if he keeps playing like that."
In life, we are very often faced with situations where we have to analyze to what extent something is the result of our own actions and to what extent it is the result of factors outside our control.
Go has luck/chance/randomness too, unless you can read out the entire game tree.
Part of go strategy is to simplify the board when you're ahead, and to try and throw the board into chaos when you're behind.
And there is a sense in which you cannot win a game of go, your opponent must lose it-- and when my opponents do so, I feel lucky, especially if their mistake is something which is obvious to me.
I think this sounds like a valuable lesson to learn, and as you say, the kind of thing you couldn't get from a deterministic game. And as with go, I suspect that some lessons from poker sink in better when you experience them in play than when you just read them. I would be interested to read more about it, if you (or any other poker players out there) have the time and interest to write a post on rationality in poker or other games with a chance component. I have a feeling that there are lessons related to probability and quantifying your beliefs that could be drawn, or perhaps stories from games that can be used as illustrations of probabilistic or Bayesian reasoning.
I'd love to see such a post too but I don't really have enough experience with poker to write it myself. My gamer friends and I mostly play alternating obscure boardgames - we like exploring a ruleset for ourselves more than we enjoy improving our skill at games that already have a well understood theory.
Poker does provide a very visceral lesson in 'sunk costs', I'll say that.
"quantifying your beliefs" - non-analytically, because analysis is time consuming.
You could flip coins to see who moves - if you really want randomness. You could introduce configurable quantities of randomness that way.