Chaos theory + Seat selection

[PAUL-IN]

I had a debate last night at the table about whether or not changing seats influences the way the cards fall. say for instance player 1 is getting bad beat and player 2 to his left is getting monster hands. if they switched seats, would it affect the outcome of the hands?

a player said that it WOULD affect the way the cards fall if they switched seats, because not only would they play differently, they would muck the hand in a different way, thereby changing the distribution of cards for the next hand, and so forth. is this chaos theory at work here?

i mentioned that if there was a steady dealer during the game, it would affect the distribution less, but someone mentioned again that each player affects the deck in some way, simply by the way he/she both PLAYS and FOLDS.

[Terry]

I think the effect would only be a little bit stronger than that of the disturbance of air molecules being caused by the butterfly outside my window.

[mosch]

I agree that changing seat order will make some small difference in the cards, but I don't think that it makes one that is at all useful in actually affecting the outcome of future rounds in any sort of predictable fashion.

You and your friend should smoke less hash.

[GuyOnTilt]

Seat changes WILL affect how the cards fall. The same way the dealer washing the cards for an extra .5 seconds will, or if a player transposes the order of the two cards (in HE) he's dealt before mucking. But even though these things affect how the deck ends up, they don't matter, because they aren't predictable.

All probabilities still remain the same, since the deck is still in random order. If people are superstitious (in which case they shouldn't be reading the probability forum) then go ahead and change your seat for no reason other than to mix up the cards.

I'm assuming that your argument was concerning people changing seats when they're running bad. A seat change won't fix that. You're still being dealt a random hand out of a 52 card deck. Barring your dealer isn't a mechanic, nothing you do will change that.

[Ray Zee]

if you believe that the hands are all predetermined for the night then you are right that you should change seats as long as you are sure that that seat is predetermined to continue getting good cards the rest of the night. usually just turning your chair once clockwise has the desired effect.

[PAUL-IN]

ok, levity aside,(i did get a kick out of the replies), i do think the distribution does change if you change seats. online play, however, does NOT use a physical deck, therefore the distribution will NOT change if you switch seats; i guess it's all about whether or not you expect a "hot" seat to remain "hot".

we all know, some seats are better than others, and they all get their share of cold spells.

[GuyOnTilt]

[ QUOTE ]
We all know, some seats are better than others...

[/ QUOTE ]

We do? Really??

[Ulysses]

Changing seats will also change the distribution online. But so will hitting the check or fold button one time half a second slower than you normally do. I think that's somewhat analagous to turning your chair once at the B&M room.

[wdbaker]

In chaos theory they say that can start up hurricanes.

[ QUOTE ]
I think the effect would only be a little bit stronger than that of the disturbance of air molecules being caused by the butterfly outside my window.


[/ QUOTE ]

[Copernicus]

As I recall the two basic theorems of Chaos Theory approach two opposite ends...Strange Attractors, that result in apparently random processes approaching a set of fixed points, and Sensitivity to Initial Conditions, which is the butterfly/hurricane effect.

The latter is generally due to the complexity of the processes that lead to the final result, and the wide variation in potential final results, being so great that modeling the system becomes impossible.

While the number of permutations of a deck of cards is extremely large, it does approach the variety of weather patterns (for example), nor are the mechanical processes that lead to those outcomes complex to model.

Will changing seats change the future, yes. Does it have applicability or roots in Chaos Theory? As a casual reader (but very appreciative of fractal art) I think not.

[ElSapo]

i do think the distribution does change if you change seats.

Yes, it may change from what it would have been had you not changed seats, but GuyOnTilt nailed it -- it isn't useful b/c you can't predict either way. Just knowing something changed doesn't help if you don't know what it changed from, nor to.

[Pockets]

Yes, of course we know that seats #3 & #7 at a 9 player table
are the best seats.

[SirRaleigh]

>> we all know, some seats are better than others, and they all get their share of cold spells.

I don't agree with this at all. One hand has no useful measureable effect on any other hand, unless a) you are able model in your head the mucking and shuffeling process. So the concept of being 'hot' upto a certain point has no relationship to that seat remaining 'hot'.

[PAUL-IN]

let's say there's a holdem game, 10 handed, playing for 24 hours. if you were to tally each seats winning hands for a session, one seat would be "better" than the other. that "better" seat is simply a statistical deviation from the norm. likewise, that "worse" seat is also a statistical deviation. i did not mean to say that a "hot" seat tends to remain hot.

please correct me: when you deal with many short sessions, resulting in small statistical samplings, the deviations are much larger than if one were to play a 20,000 hour game?

[SirRaleigh]

Yes, the deviations are much larger than if you played in a 20,000 hour game, but who cares because at any given point the information can not be used to predict future results so any talk changing seats or whatever is just silly. I would argue that after 24 hours of limit poker that the results of peoples money have less to do with card irrgularites and more to with player skill and the location of skilled and unskilled people to each other.

[PAUL-IN]

ty, raleigh. i'll come up with more interesting topics when we hold our weekly NLHE home game.

[SirRaleigh]

I will look forward to that.

[GuyOnTilt]

[ QUOTE ]
But so will hitting the check or fold button one time half a second slower than you normally do.

[/ QUOTE ]

Please elaborate.