Brain Damage

Are winning poker players brain damaged?

From Cheap Talk

Each brain-damaged person got a wad of play money, and instructions to gamble on 20 rounds of coin tossing (heads-you-win/tails-you-lose, with some added twists). Other people who had no such brain lesions got the same money and the same gambling instructions.

The brain-damaged gamblers pretty consistently ended up with more money than their healthier-brained competitors. The researchers speculate that when “normal” gamblers encounter a run of unhappy coin-toss results, they get discouraged and become cautious – perhaps too cautious. Not so the people with brain-lesion-induced emotional disfunction. Encountering a run of bad luck, they plough on, undaunted. And then enjoy a relatively handsome payoff. At least sometimes.

A course in multi level models

I don't know much about multilevel modeling but I tend to think about opponent modeling in a non-hierarchical multilevel way. Opponents are multi-dimensional, tight, aggressive, tricky, weak, etc.

Here's an online course on the topic that I think I should take. It's completely free, lectures and a textbook online. It just requires registration.

Twitter

I broke down an opened a twitter account --- @garycarson

I'll be twitting about some ncaa bets I'm making based on the LRMC model.

Decision Analysis

An intoductory lecture to decision analysis

Calculating variance

A simple optimization problem

Here's a simple optimization problem that doesn't require anything other than high school algebra and maybe some basic calculus to solve.



The technique it illustrates is just one of basic substitution when you have a problem that can easily be reduced to a problem with a single variable.

What is optimization?

Here's a video of Leon Lasdon giving a talk with some examples of successful applications of operations research.



Lasdon is one of the old guys in operations research, and he says something at the start of his talk that struck me. "Everybody knows what optimization is", he says.

I used to think that was true also. But it's really not. In the poker world many people confuse the idea of optimal with that of equilibrium. In game theory you can find the equilibrium solution as an optimal solution of a min/max problem. So among poker math dweebs it's become common to term a solution of a game theory model as optimization and to describe exploitave.

In the poker world optimization has become exploitive and equilibrium has become optimization.

Outside the poker world optimization just means doing the best you can within whatever operating constraints you might have, just like Lasdon says in the video.

Sometimes I feel like Don Quixote tilting at windmills to try to use optimization to mean optimization when talking to poker dweebs.