Two Plus Two Older Archives - essence of intelligent gambling

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essence of intelligent gambling

I can't keep up with the day-to-day posts around here but I've spotted one unprofitable trend (or profitable, depending on where you stand) that I'd like to discourage. Following sklansky's example I will post it here in the forum that is apparently attracting "bigshots" rather than wherever it properly belongs.

What is the basic principle that leads to a few people being winning gamblers and most being losers? In the end it comes down to only one thing: winners pursue bets where they have the best of it and avoid bets where they don't. This is true no matter what brand of gambling we're talking about. It can be something as simple as foregoing games of negative expectation, or as complicated as playing good poker, which in a sense is nothing more than a long series of "prop bets" where you have a degree of control over what the prop is and how much the wager will be.

Among the critical aspects of this is the ability to figure out when you're a money favorite. You can be a very successful prop bettor by refusing 99% of the bets that come your way; all you have to do is spot the 1 in a 100 where the bettor is obviously taking the worst of it. One example of where this comes up all the time is on the golf course. There are lots of guys who are dying to bet they can make a putt at even money or small odds against when their true odds of making the putt are nowhere close to that. You don't have to be a good golfer to clean up against these guys. All you have to do is accept some of the bets that they offer you.

Now I'm going to use the contents of a couple recent threads as an example of how some people are determined to go broke. Granted, I chose these example partly to make fun of the victims, but also to belabor a critical fundamental that people ignore far too often.

Someone: I say we settle this with an old fashion game of scrabble [...] The Vegas line is Paul Phillips at a 3 to 1 favorite.
Victim: I'll take that action any day and twice on Sunday, for my entire bankroll. There is simply no way that Paul would be a 3:1 favorite over me in Scrabble.

Now several people proceed to knock their grandmothers over to bet on me at that line even though I haven't said a word. As a gambler, this is the point at which the warning bells should be clanging that something is up. But no! Instead the victim goes into a tangent about the logical fallacies of her opponents, unwilling to do the minimal research necessary to objectively examine the line she has accepted. This after trying to put her entire bankroll on it.

In the age of google it takes only seconds to find out why this bet is drawing dead, but the victim would rather dig her heels in than reassess her chances. This is the moral equivalent of discovering that your wagering partner actually attended the tape-delayed game on television at the moment, the one you bet on thinking it was live; yet then doubling the bet anyway because you're so confident the home team ought to win the game.

If you aren't willing to use all the information available to you and to reassess situations as new information comes to light, then you will never be a successful gambler. Especially, if you let your ego get tied up in your betting; if you're afraid to admit your initial assessment was wrong; or if you let your desire to beat one particular person color your thinking: then you are doomed at poker and every other form of gambling. It's as big a leak as you can suffer. It is how the winners bankrupt the losers.

Here's another example. In this case rather than accepting a horrible line, the author sets one:

Victim #2: I would bet that in a large tourney most top players are more than 90% likely to double up before going bust.

Setting bad lines is an even faster way to go broke than accepting them. As david points out in that thread, if that were true it would mean most top players are required to fold aces preflop. It's even worse than that though. Aces are only 85.2% against a completely random hand. If you are 90% to double up by other means you have to fold aces even if your opponent moves all-in preflop without looking!! If top players actually followed this strategy, how long do you think it would take the "lesser" players to find a strategy to exploit them? It wouldn't be too complicated to discover.

This illusion that top players are so amazingly successful is built on the fallacy of selective memory. People see names they know at the top of the leaderboard for day two and imagine those particular ones are the top players. They rarely look at the entire list of who went out on day one, or better yet, make predictive lists of "top players" before the tournament begins and check whether 90% doubled up before going broke.

It's very dangerous to invent percentages out of thin air. I realize this is "only" a discussion board and that people are accustomed to talking out of their ass without it having any consequences. Regardless, I suggest it's an awfully bad habit for a gambler (or anyone, but especially a gambler) to have. If you instead form the habit of thinking hard about a bet before you set a line on it, you are likely to have much more success in your gambling endeavors. Including poker.

And then there is the more general principle that one should be willing to back up one's words. Inventing lines out of thin air leaves you in the unenviable position of having to either take a bad bet or admit you had no idea what you were talking about. The latter is much superior from a bankroll preservation standpoint, but better yet is to try to set a decent line in the first place.

Happy wagering...