What do you think is important? (long)

[Warren Whitmore]

Mason has often stated that to become an expert at poker there is no one thing to do or study, it is indeed a whole lot of things. I compleatly agree with this. I was wondering what the top 5 lessons you have learned, whom you have learned them from, and how you apply them. In fairness I will supply the ones which have helped me the most. This sharing of information should help all of us to play better. Thanks in advance for all replies.
(1) Mike Caro: "Some mathmaticians may argue that I'm missing the point. Probability was developed on the assumption that results are random and formulas were created with randomness in mind. But in whole history of the universe there has never been a random event. Everything happens because of everything esle that has already happened." With a deterministic view of the world it makes it impossible to go on tilt or lose emotional control on any event. With the knowledge that everything is pre set one can focus 100% of ones efforts on the delusion of freedom of choice and work within that frame work.
(2)Mason Malmuth: "it dosen't matter what kind of poker game it is. The expert players, who consistently take home the money, all follow non-self-weighting strategies." With this information I made more $ trading palace station and mgm stock than I will ever make at any poker game.
(3) David Sklansky: "play all games well" I used to play 7 card stud exclusivly. I don't do that anymore. I now use a basic y=mx+b linear slop formula, play in the best game using a player profile type spread sheet which I have programed. I play the game with the greatest win rate or chose to not play at all if the hourly rate is unsatisfactory. You can't do this with only one game unless you are content to only play a few hours a week or your a great player which sadly I am not.
By the way I am a lazy bastard and as a consequence I fought this one for a long time. Its a lot of work to learn to play all games well about 1000 hours of study and practice before playing. The results do justify the means it turns out its better to be in the top 10% of all games that the top 2% of one. When there is a soft seat available you need to be able to sit in it.
(4)David Sklansly: "Cup of coffee" From his vidio tape: This one came naturally no effort requiered.
(5)Mark weinstein from wall street wizzards "I also don't lose much on my trades, because I wait for the exact right moment. Most people will not wait for the environment to tip itself off. They will walk into the forest when it is still dark, while I wait until it gets light. Although the cheetah is the fastest animal in the world and can catch any animal on the plains, it will wait until it is absoluely sure it can catch its prey. It may hid in the bush for a week , waiting for just the right moment . It will wait for a baby antelope, and not just any baby antelope, but preferably one that is also sick or lame. Only then, when there is no chance it can lose its prey, does it attack. That, to me, is the epitome of professional trading." You need to be able to walk into any terain and within 30 minutes find the most profitable seat, in the best game, at the best limit.

[MS Sunshine]

"You need to be able to walk into any terain and within 30 minutes find the most profitable seat, in the best game, at the best limit."

It's hard to put this better.

MS Sunshine

[mdlm]

Warren,

Can you say more about your y=mx+b formula? What is y, what is x, and how do you compute m and b?

#1 is wrong. At the quantum level, things do not happen as the result of prior things. They just happen. They are in fact random. Determinism has been dead and buried for 70 years; the word should have gotten out by now.

#other. Can you expand on your "non-self weighting" idea as attributed to Mason?

In regards to statement one let me add two more items that are not determined by prior events. The roll of the dice. The result on a roulette wheel.

[Mike]

It's the formula for determining slope of a line. What it is being used for in the text, I can't answer.

[happyjaypee]

</font><blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr />
In regards to statement one let me add two more items that are not determined by prior events. The roll of the dice. The result on a roulette wheel.

[/ QUOTE ]


The roll of a dice is determined by it's weight, the angle it left your hand, the strenght you throw it, the friction coeficient of the surface it hits, the air resistance, the gravity, etc. All those are not possible for a human to manipulate but they ARE calculable if u had ALL the variables.

Jeez... You existe because a homosapien shagged one female instead of the other on a precise ovulation cycle a million years ago and a precice spermatosoid won the race that day...... That event, like an infinit number of others, is a variable necessary for you to exist. Your birth was not random but the result of a certain course of events.

[Warren Whitmore]

Hi mdlm,
Y=mx+b is the formula to find the slop of a linear line.
Y=The y axis
X=The x axis
m=the slop of the line.
b=the offset from zero.
It is a very usefull formula for determining if a game is profitable or not. For example, lets say that you run correlation coefficents and find that opponant abbility is important for your hourly rate maximization. One way of applying that knowledge (certainly not the only one) would be to set up a grid similar to the one in psycholgy of poker.
(1)Name an excel spread sheet.
(2)set up columns with Player name, stone killer, Rock, mainiac, calling station, and sum.
(3)Each time you see a show down record for that player which catagory he or she fell into be careful to add a group from the sklansky system of hand ranking to the suited conectors if there are greater that forty percent not playing as stone killers otherwise you will underate some opponants.
(4)when you have 25 data points for an opponant use vectors to determine how far away the individual is from the stone killer quarter.
(5)For each hour determine generically how far away the game overall was from the stone killer quarter.
(6)Plot the overall game delta from (5) versus your hourly rate for 100 hours.
(7)here is where the Y=mx+b comes in. Using this formula determine what the delta from the stone killer type needs to be for you to make an acceptable hourly rate.
(8)When you are checking out potential games type in all the players and thier results get the average if it is above your target play don't play if not, walk.

[Warren Whitmore]

Hi Bohm,
"can you elaborate on masons non selfweighting ideas."
No where near as well as he could but I will try. Mason wrote an excellent book called "gambeling theory" in which he defends the theory that non selfweighting is the best way to make the most of it when you have the best of it. He does a very convincing job. The way it made me $ on the stock market was to get me to stop looking at the market purly as a technician and to shift more towards a fundamentalist point of view. I had allways just held the s&amp;p 5oo and used regression to the mean for my tradding points. For example drop the mean growth rate for the market over the s&amp;p data and move a few percentage points in and out of the market at a time. This worked well beating the S&amp;P by 6-8 percent a year for the past 5 years. Masons contetion was that one could do much better than this by focusing on the best one or two stocks. I set up a spread sheet using PE,EPS,graph direction, news, and potential growth for industry. Derived correlation coefficints for all of them and pretend tradded for the last year. It worked. I may try it in real life this year. The trade that made me some real $ though was listening to the players talk at the Bellagio. they were from all over the world staying at the hotel and playing cards. Being cheap I was staying at palace station. When I chatted with the people in the card room there I found them to mostly be locals, in fact almost everyone in the casino was. when 911 occured in september I remembered that immediatly selling my mgm stock and buying palace station. As predicted because of travel reduction the mgm stock went down and the palace station up. This was something I would not have done without reading that book.
I hope this answers your question.

[mdlm]

Warren,

Thanks a lot for the explanation.

Let me see if I understand how it works.

Let's say that in one hand two players, Bill and Max, go to the river. Bill shows AA and Max shows 27.

Here is what my entries would look like for this hand.

Player name Stone-Killer Rock Mainiac Calling-station Idiot
Bill 1 0 0 0 0
Max 0 0 0 0 1

What this says is that on this hand Bill was a stone killer and Max was an idiot.

Two questions: (1) What do you mean by 'sum'? and (2) What do you do if the game doesn't get to showdown?

Now you get a bunch of results like this. So for player Bill you collect 25 vectors that look like this:
&lt;1,0,0,0,0&gt; (stone killer)
&lt;0,1,0,0,0&gt; (rock)
&lt;0,0,0,0,1&gt; (idiot)
&lt;1,0,0,0,0&gt; (stone killer)
Etc.

You now do an average to find the overall player vector for Bill. For example, let's say that Bill is a stone killer 5 out of the 25 times, a rock 10 out of 25 times, a mainiac 3 out of 25 times, a calling station 2 out of 25 times, and an idiot 5 out of 25 times. Then his overall vector would be:
&lt;0.2,0.4,0.12,0.08,0.2&gt;

You collect such vectors for everyone that you normally play against.

Now when you analyze the game you take the vectors for each player in the game and you compute an overall game vector. I assume that the overall game vector is just the average of the components of each of the individual vectors. So, for example, if there are two players in a game and their vectors are &lt;1,0,0,0,0&gt; and &lt;0,1,0,0,0&gt; then the overall game vector is &lt;0.5,0.5,0,0,0&gt;. Is this right?

You then compute the distance between this game vector and &lt;1,0,0,0,0&gt; which is the stone killer vector.

I assume that you do this by finding the difference between each component of the vector, squaring the difference, summing the differences, and then taking the square root of the sum.

So, for example, the distance between &lt;1,0,0,0,0&gt; and &lt;0.2,0.4,0.12,0.08,0.2&gt; is:
the square root of (1-0.2)^2 + (0-0.4)^2 + (0-0.12)^2 + (0-0.08)^2+(0-0.2)^2.
this is equal to sqrt of 0.64 + 0.16 + 0.0144 + 0.0064 + 0.04
which is equal to the sqrt of 0.8608 which is 0.928.

You then sit down and play this game and discover that you can beat it at 0.5 BB/hr.

This gives you your first data point for the y=mx+b equation. The y is 0.5 BB/hr and the x is 0.928.

You then do this for a total of 100 hours and you calculate m and b.

Now that you have the y=mx+b equation, when you sit down to analyze a game, you use the individual player vectors to calculate the overall game vector. You then find the distance of the game vector to the stone killer vector. This is your x. You plug this into the y=mx+b formula and this gives you y which is your BB/hr. You do this for all of the games that are available and you sit down at the one with the biggest y.

Is this correct?

[Warren Whitmore]

The sum column is to make it easyer to convert everything to percentages. If the game does not go to compleation just ignor that data point. Yes you have the right idea.
Warren

[GrannyMae]

So, for example, the distance between &lt;1,0,0,0,0&gt; and &lt;0.2,0.4,0.12,0.08,0.2&gt; is:

CAUSES THIS TO HAPPEN

http://216.40.249.192/mysmilies/contrib/monsieurboo/overclocking.gifhttp://216.40.249.192/mysmilies/contrib/monsieurboo/overclocking.gifhttp://216.40.249.192/mysmilies/contrib/monsieurboo/overclocking.gifhttp://216.40.249.192/mysmilies/contrib/monsieurboo/overclocking.gif

[mdlm]

Granny,

Where did you get all of those cute pictures?

BTW, did you know that TotalPoker is giving $40 to anyone who plays for a couple of hours and fills out a questionnaire? The play money players aren't too good. I made $2500 in 3.5 hours playing 20/40. ;) Let's hope the same is true of the real money players. The site is promoted by Andy Glazer who has a large following among newbies...

[GrannyMae]

BTW, did you know that TotalPoker is giving $40 to anyone who plays for a couple of hours and fills out a questionnaire?

got a URL on the details? i was a beta tester &amp; have received nothing about this.

http://www.gamers-forums.com/smilies/ups/razor_wind/mumumani.gifhttp://www.gamers-forums.com/smilies/ups/razor_wind/mumumani.gifhttp://www.gamers-forums.com/smilies/ups/razor_wind/mumumani.gifhttp://www.gamers-forums.com/smilies/ups/razor_wind/mumumani.gif

[mdlm]

Granny,

I learned about the $40 in Glazer's Wednesday Night Poker newsletter (I've excerpted some of the relevant passages below).

Go to http://www.casino.com/newsletter/poker/archive/ and click on Volume 49 for the full details.

BTW, this should probably be taking place over Private Messaging but I see that you have me censored!? Grr....

------------------------------
Excerpt from Glazer's Wednesday Nite Poker


Have you ever heard the saying “ the early bird catches the worm?” As an “early bird” invitation, we would like to offer you an exclusive sneak-peek invitation to test out TotalPoker’s new Beta version software. We’ll include a $40 bonus, too!

This exclusive invitation is only being offered to players that have signed up at Casino.com and subscribers to Wednesday Nite Poker.

To take part in the FREE $40 bonus offer, all you have to do is play at TotalPoker, then tell us what you think! Play for at least two hours before December 5th, 2002, and then fill out the questionnaire on our site. Once we receive your comments, we will deposit $40 in real money into your TotalPoker account on the first day we open for real wagers.

[pudley4]

Totalpoker proudly displays the logo of the Kahnawake Gaming Commission /forums/images/icons/shocked.gif

[mdlm]

Warren,

I think that your post on the Whitmore Table Selection Method is one of the best posts ever on this forum.

What I like about it is that it takes a key challenge (table selection) which most poker authors discuss in a touchy-feely way and describes an exact quantitative method that solves the problem.

I did a search on your name and it looks like you haven't posted much on 2+2. Where can I find the rest of your poker writings?

Thx.

[GrannyMae]

BTW, this should probably be taking place over Private Messaging but I see that you have me censored!?

what does this mean mdlm??

Granny never censored anyone except william coleman. and the only reason i censored him from sending me regular email was becase he was spamming me with chain letters.

that is the only block i have ever placed on anyone, anywhere.

are you saying you tried to send a private message and it failed? it must have been a problem withe the messenging service.

granny don't censor, she GETS censored.


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[mdlm]

I sent you a PM about the TotalPoker $40 promotion and it didn't go through. Maybe I'll try again.