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.

Thanks for the clarification. I understand your goals better now. That said, let me suggest that there's a tension between some of what you're saying. On the one hand, you want to focus on the links between rationality/bias-overcoming and poker. That's a great plan, and it seems like you could make a great contribution there. (I'm envisioning a less-mystical Tommy Angelo here.)

But on the other hand, you seem to also be focusing on poker instruction, which I think might be a problem. Are you planning on deriving and teaching a strategy for poker based on first principles? I think that's impractical, because the game is just too complicated. However, it seems like any other approach would dilute your brand and distract your from making a truly novel contribution.

I think you would be well advised to ditch the idea of teaching players who are complete novices and focus more on helping players who are at an intermediate+ level now develop a rational approach to the game.

Best of luck with the project!

Rather than deciding independently how much to read and what to read, you might try to read any given book when reading it seems like the best among all possible activities.

Some of the questions you are asking seem like artifacts of fixing a total amount of time to spend reading, which doesn't really make sense unless the act of reading itself is important to you.

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."

FYI: Rumor says the plan for the South Bay meetup is to experiment with a variety of icebreakers, rationality games, and other themed evenings & see what works.

We're talking with Nectar Village about being an official part of their village this year. I'd just throw down with Playagon, but it's already getting to be a bit late to be planning a new camp in their village and our relationship is pretty good with Nectar Village at this point such that they're going to put us on the map once we know how much space to reserve.

Also, I think Nectar Village has a fair amount of playa location magic as well as a spa + solar power, and their location last year was decidedly better than Playagon last year which was uncomfortably close to Nexus.

The best scenario is if we can figure out how to get Playagon and Nectar Village to be located adjacently. Maybe the power of intention, that's supposed to work well at Burning Man.

I'm interested in hearing a bit more on meeting structure ("Meetup Topics" heading), as well as how it relates to time progression (what types of activities work best for forming the tribe vs. later maintaining it).

This post is wonderful! The general category of "codified knowledge about best practices on how to do something important gained from doing it for hundreds of hours" is way underrepresented on LW. The density of practical experience makes it harder to write than finding a study or bias and musing about it, but it also makes it a lot more useful.

I look forward to helping replicate these practices in the Bay Area. Although achieving gender balance here is going to be a pretty significant challenge...

Feed confirmatory evidence to others, give them tests to run which you know beforehand are confirmatory

This is not a way to take advantage of confirmation bias. Confirmation bias means that others look for confirming evidence for their true theories, and ignore disconfirming evidence. This process is not much affected by you adding extra confirmatory evidence - they can find plenty on their own. Instead, it is a way to fool rational people - for example, Bayesians who update based on evidence will update wrong if fed biased evidence. Which doesn't really fit here.

The way to actually use confirmation bias to convince people of things is to present beliefs you want to transmit to them as evidence for things they already believe. Then confirmation bias will lead them to believe this new evidence without question, because they wish to believe it to confirm their existing beliefs.

I think a large contingent on LW would be more interested in what an optimal employment scenario looks like after graduating with a high-value degree. I know I am.