Re: Caro Article
[ QUOTE ]
I've never used math in life playing poker except for calculating pot odds and I've done just fine. I could care less if a man is 25% likely to go on tilt or 75% likely, what I care about is whether or not he's on tilt. Do you have any idea the amount of times you'd have to observe a particular player get beat to make an accurate estimate of his likeliness to be on tilt?
[/ QUOTE ]
I don't understand what you are trying to argue with me about here. My stance is very simple and you aren't saying anything that contradicts it: Psychological aspects of poker can be mathematically modelled. It doesn't matter if you model them or not. I never said that you can't play winning poker without doing such things, simply that it is possible to do such modeling, and that Caro is using the term "mathematics" to refer to other simple forms of mathematics that are different than these types of models.
I really think this is obvious and I don't understand what point you are trying to make here because I agree with you that a ton of players play winning poker without doing explicit calculations. I know a lot of people don't care about advanced statistics that model individual players. A lot of people don't care about pot odds in tournaments and only think about winning percentage and surviving, and some of these players find a way to do alright. Does that mean pot odds are 100% meaningless, useless, or that it's impossible to calculate them? Of course not! I *know* many people don't use advanced mathematics to model their opponents and their tendencies, but does that mean it's impossible to do so or that these advanced stats are 100% meaningless and useless? Again.. of course not!
When you say you only care whether he is on tilt or not, not whether he has a 75% chance of being on tilt, you should understand that rarely (especially online) can you be 100% sure of such things before actually seeing your opponent's cards. It is the same basic concept as putting your opponent on a range of hands rather than a single hand.
And as for the number of observations... small number of observations = large uncertainty. More observations = smaller uncertainty. I literally observe every single hand that is played on the sites I play on at the stakes I play at (of course I eventually drop older hands when they stop correlating well with the way the player currently plays). For the regulars who multi-table, I end up having tens of thousands of observed hands on them in a month.
|