Incidentally, this also presents a solution for those of us looking to earn money from anywhere with a flexible schedule that leaves time for outside interests.
Also, if you sign up for one of the online poker rooms like Full Tilt using our affiliate links, the residuals get donated to Less Wrong/Singularity Institute. That way, the more poker you play after you sign up, the more money you direct towards raising the sanity waterline and creating provably friendly artificial intelligence.
This all sounds great, but there is a nearly complete absence of numbers in this posting or at your site. Here are some estimates I came up with that may provide a more complete picture.
Suppose you sign up to play using one of their affiliate links, and then become very good at poker. Good enough to win (on average) $50/hr playing. If you play 20 hrs/week and 50 weeks/year, that gives you a comfortable $50K/year income (before taxes) and plenty of time for outside interests. So far, so good.
Next, I'm going to assume that you make that $50/hr by playing in 5 person games in which each of you bets about $2000 per hour. You win back a collection of pots totalling $2050 each hour - hence your $50...
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.
... your blast of moral indignation.
Clearly, you have never seen me indignant.
Yes, there was a subtext in my analysis, but you missed it. It wasn't that our hypothetical player is immorally stealing from the innocent fish. It is that our would-be shark runs a very high risk of just becoming another fish himself.
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.
Or, perhaps, they could be very good at poker but poor at the meta game of finding high stakes players who are stupid. A far more important task! Actual technical skills are far less important than putting yourself in the right positions at the right time.
you may want to warn people that they need to play a large amount of hands for variance to go down to acceptable levels.
The last time someone told me "Good luck", I replied, "I don't believe in an ontologically fundamental tendency toward positive outcomes."
I looked through your site so far, and I didn't see any math or any hands, which was discouraging. It's good to think about cognitive biases and how to reduce them, but really the way to make money at poker (especially at SNGs and especially at small/microstakes) is to understand starting hand ranges, position, tournament strategy, and postflop play as deeply as possible, and then learn how to apply those concepts to hands. You can't do that by thinking about theory, you need to actually look at specifics.
To be brutally honest, it's hard to see how you're going to differentiate your product from the hordes of poker blogs and forums that are already out there but have the advantage of having great poker players contributing.
Try looking at the book Small Stakes Holdem by Ed Miller. It's a good example of taking fundamental insights about how poker players play badly and using them to create an actionable strategy that says "play this hand, raise in this situation."
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 els...
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.
Just now the New York Times is running yet another profile of a young geeky guy making and losing millions at online poker. If this were the first one, that'd be one thing, but I've seen quite a few such articles - here, on Hacker News, in my RSS reader.
It's starting to trip my general 'bubble' pattern-recognition system. This reminds me of the original Internet Bubble where you would read about young people making ludicrous sums for crap work or no real reason at all, and so everyone piled into computer science programs (or into law schools, for that matter).
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.
Otherwise whip smart people tend to be delusional about gambling. This applies also to the stock market. Gambling is a minefield of meaningless patterns which trigger our pattern detectors. I presume that's a large part of why it's so fun.
Some people reading that will say, "yes, I already know that for most people gambling is a pandora's box of rationality-killing delusion-inducing spurious patterns, I've incorporated into my thinking, so belaboring the point is just wasting my time". But what I have found is that, however much I think I have incorporated that insight into my thinking, I did not incorporate it fully enough.
My guess about your smart acquaintances is that they have been lucky and are delusional. As for why they don't dive into their delusion, quit their day jobs and destroy their life savings, which is the point of inconsistency that's puzzling you, it may be ...
Having a well-meaning site for teaching poker that doesn't link to Two Plus Two forums looks rather silly.
It's such a premier resource on the topic. High quality guides on most topics, and helpful people giving high-quality answers to anything a newbie might want to ask.
That link is all an intelligent person needs to become a winning poker player. (Assuming that one utilizes said resource, of course.)
Sure, there are good poker psychology issues. I'm in agreement on that.
But you can be a very fine rationalist without being good at cards, and vice versa. (I consider myself a fine rationalist, and I am very good at both poker and bridge; over the last 100 hours I've played poker (the last three years; I don't play online because it's illegal) I'm up about $60 an hour, though that's likely unsustainable over the long haul. ($40 an hour is surely sustainable.)
But you can be nutty and be great at cards. And if your skill set isn't this - and you're not willing to commit to some real time at getting good - you're going to get crushed. The idea that simple rationalism is going to lead to big wins is just wrong. You need the math and (less, I think) reading the opponents. You also need to develop the skill of being hard to read.
--JRM
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.
Upvoted purely for the willingness to cash out all this rationality talk in terms of operational improvements.
That said, I would also endorse incorporating some element of reliable testing into your project.
That is, if after six months you've got N people signed up on your site and making a bunch of money, and you want to evaluate your program to see how much of a benefit the program provided (as opposed to just attracting good poker players in the first place), will you be able to answer that question?
(I've only skimmed the site, so sorry if that's covered and I missed it.)
I would be interested in a program that allowed playing poker with fake money against bots, in a way that collects statistics and grades the quality of your play. Playing online poker for real money against real humans is not a precedent I want to set, even if it is a valuable training exercise.
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.
After some amount of practice, playing poker should be +EV. Betting money while still a poker noob, however, is certainly -EV. I'd be more willing to bet money if I had some indication, preferrably in the form of an Elo rating, that I can expect to come out ahead.
I've played poker for play money. There's not as much pain when losing so there is correspondingly less motivation to exercise discipline, come to correct beliefs, or deal seriously with the difficult psychological situations. Learning to take those things seriously and perform under "survival instinct"-level pressure is the point of this training. You want the actions you take to imprint your habits and reshape them to be more rational over time and play money can't do that. See the post I linked to above for a longer explanation.
The football study you link to shows me that in cases where there's already a rich information market, real and pretend markets both mirror it well. That doesn't indicate to me that people wagering in the play money markets had a similar visceral experience or would learn the same lessons from failure or success. I strongly suspect they didn't -- and would bet money on it if I could figure out how.
Playing poker for play chips online quickly teaches that there's a huge difference between $0.01 and $0.00 when it comes to quality of play. Games that don't require something be risked end up being jokes.
PokerStrategy provides you with a $50 starting capital if you pass their quiz. They supply all the information you need to pass on their size so it's an easy quiz if you simply look up the answers. The $50 counts as "bonus cash" so while you can play with them at real money tables you cannot withdraw them, unless you generate enough bonus points from rake.
If you want to try it, use this link to give me some referral credits ;) http://sv.pokerstrategy.com/u8N2DY
One thing which I dislike about Poker though is that the feedback is NOT immediate. If...
Is there any kind of poker "bot" that isn't autonomous, but analyzes your hand and the context, and simply gives advice and probabilities?
I'm very interested in this idea. Do you know of any good (preferably free) software for practicing against computers? (I used to be pretty good in high school, but I haven't played since.)
Still, do you think this is a good idea for a rationality dojo? Poker is at best a zero sum game (probably negative-sum, in practice), which seems like something aspiring rationalists should try to avoid.
Wouldn't something like day trading (where there is at least a general tendency for positive returns) be better?
Poker training this Sunday in Berkeley:
This Sunday at 12:30PM, Poker Stars is having what will either be the biggest online poker tournament ever, or more likely, a strongly money added tournament.
It is an $11 tournament with a $1MM prize pool guarantee. The tournament may take as long as 10 hours or possibly longer to finish, but quite likely you will lose long before then.
Please sign up for Poker Stars in advance via the affiliate link at http://rationalpoker.com/ if you aren't already signed up. Then, make a $20 deposit using the bonus code STORM, for ...
Thanks for this. I've been wondering about the best way to earn an income for a while, and I've for several years known several folks who make good money by online poker. Some of them good enough to earn a living. This provided the final nudge to convince me to try it out. (And I'll sign up through this site, naturally. SIAI donations made easy, what's not to love?)
I've put "try out online poker" on my to-do list for the summer. Do you have estimates regarding the shape of the function mapping time practicing/reading to revenue? E.g. how much practice does it take to reach, say, a 10$/h or 50$/h average profit?
This is a great idea. Congrats!
Personally, I don't gamble for money, because I would go broke very quickly, but this is such a great idea that I'm almost tempted.
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.
You do realize that the owners of Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker stole tens of millions from players? I think you would be wise not to act as an affiliate for that company.
Will players who sign up with you receive rake back?
Do you have some statistics on the distribution of average percentage gain per hand among poker players, how it varies with practice, and how constant it is?
For instance, what are the average and standard deviation of (winnings / money bet) for professional poker players? What fraction of these professional poker players can be explained as just being lucky?
I would think that you would win at online poker not by training, but by getting a good computer program to lay your bets.
Would it be possible to design a game that encourages rationality?
It seems unlikely that there would be a game already existing optimized for our goals.
Online poker is the most brutal rationality test I know of. As a one time “semi-professional” player, I experienced things which really strained my capacity to believe in a random universe. It would be amusing to watch someone like Eliezer Yudkowsky play poker; I can easily imagine him becoming an emotional, superstitious nut throwing keyboards against the wall like almost everyone else who plays poker long enough!
This is really great! I was hoping some sort of rationalist/poker mashup would materialize (and would have organized something like this myself if my rationalist knowledge matched my poker knowledge ;-)
I've always believed poker to be a great test for rationality. OK, maybe it's not perfect -- but who can suggest something better? Also, it's got mainstream popularity going for it which is very valuable.
That said, there are other details which contribute to being good at poker. Last year I conducted an informal study into the personality traits of online p...
I think this is a great idea, and I'm interested in seeing how it unfolds. It could form part of the more general project of training gut-level rationality into people. Gathering declarative knowledge about biases and heuristics and Bayesian statistics and so forth is very important, but the end goal is to actually change behavior for the better.
I recently had a similar idea, that learning magic could teach a person a lot about intuition and faulty thinking in people. Not Magic: The Gathering, but actual James Randi/ Derren Brown kind of magic. Brow...
Be aware that it's possible to cheat at online poker by controlling multiple players in one game and passing information between them. If you're not doing that, you can lose to other people who are doing that, no matter how good you are. The people running the game don't care, since they get their fees regardless.
Better to play with real cards and real people if you don't want to cheat.
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.
I assume that a human can't do better than a computer when playing against a player with no biases. At the professional level, play should converge closer and closer to the unbiased ideal, so that poker experience and human insight should become less and less valuable.
Do professional poker players make mo...
Wow. A Full Tilt affiliate link on the front page of lesswrong. For those of you who aren't aware this means that if you click on this link and then subsequently sign up to that poker room and gamble then the author (actually the affiliate account holder) will get paid.
While I have to admire the effort and acknowledge the link between poker and rationality - I think the affiliate link tips this towards the realm of self interested marketing rather than helpful knowledge sharing. Of course it's probably a mix of both but it's important to be aware of the c...
I've noticed lately a lot of websites seem to use some bizarre font that looks awful. But since they keep doing it, I'm beginning to wonder if it's just me that sees it looking awful. Does it look like this for anyone else?
Related to: Problem of verifying rationality
We're excited to announce the (soft) launch of RationalPoker.com! It's a new guide developed by me, Zvi, Kevin, and patrissimo detailing how to use online poker as rationality training to conquer your cognitive biases. We want our community to go from knowing a lot about cognitive biases to actually having a training method that allows us to integrate that knowledge into our habits -- truly reducing biases instead of just leaving us perpetually lamenting our flawed brain-ware. In the coming weeks, we'll be making the case that online poker is a useful rationalist pursuit along with developing introductory "How To" material that allows those who join us to play profitably.
We want to make sure we aren’t wasting our time practicing an ungrounded art with methods that don’t work. Poker gives us an objective way to test x-rationality. The difference between winning and losing in poker once you know a small amount of domain-specific knowledge is due to differing levels of rationality. Our site will be presenting the case that a strong rationalist who can act on their knowledge of cognitive biases (a defining feature of x-rationality but not traditional rationality) should have a distinct advantage. We'll be offering the connecting material between the sequences and online poker to teach you how to apply knowledge of cognitive biases to poker in a way that verifies your current level of rationality and naturally teaches you to improve your rationality over time.
Incidentally, this also presents a solution for those of us looking to earn money from anywhere with a flexible schedule that leaves time for outside interests.
We’re just getting started so please be kind! Our site is definitely not a final product yet. If you're curious about where we're going with this though, add us to your RSS feeds or check the site every few days. We hope some of you who aren't convinced yet consider playing once you feel like we’ve finally given you enough information to understand why poker is a profitable rationalist pursuit.
Also, if you sign up for one of the online poker rooms like Full Tilt using our affiliate links, the residuals get donated to Less Wrong/Singularity Institute. That way, the more poker you play after you sign up, the more money you direct towards raising the sanity waterline and creating provably friendly artificial intelligence.
We’re not counting on it, but even a very small group of us could theoretically fund SIAI in a very real and meaningful way just as a side-effect of playing a lot of online poker. I know I'm partisan, but this seems like an unreasonably exciting opportunity! So if you support SIAI and you (or your friends) want to sign up to play online poker anyway, please sign-up using our links.
Anyway, we hope some of you want to get stronger by joining us in the Rationality Dojo of online poker. You can be part of our crew of aspiring rationalists who want to increase our rationality, earn money, and help save the world -- all by playing a fun computer game with no boss, no schedule, and the potential for lots of self-development and personal growth.
So check out our site and let us know if you're interested in joining.
