IQ/Poker/David Sklansky

[David Sklansky]

"Course he probably meant to have said high school, rather than little league - I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the difference between hitting .700 and .460 in little league isn't a real meaningful predictor of success in AA ball, but I digress.)"

Actually in between. About ninth grade. By high school that much difference would almost certainly carry through indefinitely.

"But I also got to wonder - what do the .700 and .460 little league averages equate to? Not SAT scores again? Does David know what "Chris hit in little league"

A perfect math SAT does not equate to 700 batting average. More like .450 The knowledge and ability at age 13 to get A's in a freshman collegec math course and winning statewide junior high math events is more like it. Chris's batting average is just a guess on my part based on UCLA and a few other things.If he was at the top of his class at UCLA, he is about as smart as the average Harvard Phd, or conceivably even smarter and I underestimated him.

"Did David essentially just say, "If brains were baseball, Chris Ferguson would be a utility infielder for a AA team."?? Not that it's not tough to even make it that far, by the way, but still."

Unless Chris is a lot smarter than the average UCLA Phd, there are many thousands smarter than him. About the same number that play baseball better than routine AA ballplayers. On the other hand maybe only 100 kids batted .700 in junior high ball. A lot of them would remain in the top 1000 if they pursued it.

"Course this doesn't exactly make sense, since David just named him #5 on his Ten Smartest Poker Players list"

It makes perfect sense. Only William Chen is possibly in the major leagues. Don't know enough about that. (Unless, Chris is one of the best ever at UCLA). Mark Weitzman was in the middle of his high energy physics Phd class at Cal Tech. Thus there are over a thousand guys smarter than him. Triple A ball.

"By the way, it's just my opinion, but regarding that quote from ALL IN magazine - I would be willing to bet that Chris Ferguson intuitively recognizes situations in practice where a bet might be proper to stop a bluff, even when it's only going to be called by a hand that beats it, and when it's not going to cause a better hand to fold. And still mistakenly make such a quote to a magazine. I would think you would agree....I just don't think being wrong about that in a statement to a magazine (in this particular instance) means much...."

Except that I actually asked him if he was aware that there was an exception and he wasn't. One mistake of course does not prove anything. Still the fact is that his statement INSTANTLY jumped out to me as wrong and I feel that super smart people would rarely screw up this way. But I am a harsh critic. I can't believe that Leibniz would think that a 12 and 11 have the same probabilty, that Von Neumann would sum the series in the fly problem, and that Euler wouldn't realize that probalistic reasoning would almost guarantee a counter example to his conjecture about three fourth powers not ever summing to a fourth one. I can't be as much smarter than them than these mistakes imply so maybe the same is true of Chris.