project to collect handhistories

[sfer]

1. I think it's very likely you underestimate the data necessary to do a project like this well.
2. If you are sincere, you are going to need hundreds of books to give out.
3. You should offer a Confidentiality Agreement to contributors.

[dchandler321]

You raise a good point about the amount of data needed. For some questions we do not believe we will need that much data. Others will as you say take a great deal of hand histories from many people. Steven Levitt is prepared to give away copies of his book to people who help him with the project. Moreover, despite permanent wrist injuries from his several years of data entry as a graduate student, he will also sign them.

We understand that players have good reason to be cautious of sharing their hand histories with anyone. We have written on our webpage in several places that no data will be shared with anyone not working on the project. But we should probably make this more explicit and prominently displayed on the webpage. People who are suspicious that we are even academically affiliated can mail their hand histories directly to the Initiative on Chicago Price Theory at the University of Chicago.

[mosta]

the project sounds cool. I would presume that the most interesting results would be concerning the very biggest winners. that would be the guys making over, and well into, 6 figures from poker. I don't know just how many people that is on this site, but I'm quite confident that it's more than a handful. here are some problems:

1. poker income often causes people concerns about legality, taxes, undeclared offshore accounts, social disapprobation--and there's also just simple personal privacy about income in general.

2. these players have a lot more than 20-30,000 hands in their databases. they have hundreds of thousands of hands. they may not feel they need help with their analysis.

3. these players don't want to give away their secrets, or educate their customers, or be figured out by someone else.

my prediction: you probably won't get the best data.

[mosta]

concern #4: you may have to know something (or a lot) about poker to even ask the right questions. (I remember in my stats class in soci grad school the hard core quant professor made some disparaging comment about not needing theory--just run "all" the variables in the regression. I don't think it works that way. and I don't know if you can come up with the really interesting combinations of betting/position/hand _type_/etc without a high level of knowledge. but then poker is a pretty small game in terms of number of combinations, so maybe you can. there are important variables outside the content of a single hand, though. your image as it develops over the course of an individual session is important, eg. anyway, it's your project...)

[Bascule]

I'm interested enough to submit my pokertracker database, but the upload page doesn't seem to be working...

[sfer]

I guess it really depends on the design of the intended paper. There are questions that are just about impossible to determine without nearly overwhelmingly large chunks of data, and some of those questions are exceedingly basic (i.e., Am I a winning player? Is 87s a profitable hand in the CO in a standard online mid-limit game?). That plus you really want to try to control for things like game texture and relative position, which adds up to something like maybe 0.5 BB/100 but is significant enough for most players such that they will spend hours datamining to take advantage of it.

The Confidentiality Agreement gives contributors confidence that the data will not be redistributed, sold, etc etc etc.

Finally, unless someone on the team is already a mid-limit player, there are probably several regular posters you want to consult (i.e. buy a beer and pick their brain) before you go down the road of a 6-month stint compiling and programming SAS code that never gets used.

[mosta]

to get a chance at the really juicy stuff you would probably have to promise to strip all references to the player from the data--ie, screen name, hand number, date. you might agree to submit your analysis to the player by email, but then promise to delete that email address and message. the point is that a player would want to be confident that if the DA seized your data (and all your hard drives and email accounts) there would be NOTHING to tie it to a player.

[dchandler321]

We're currently working on a progress bar for the uploading part of the website. It could definitely be more user-friendly. I have just tested the mechanism and believe that the uploading mechanism does work, you just don't know it does until the upload completes. Sorry about this.

[Bascule]

Internet explorer gives me this error:

Action canceled
Internet Explorer was unable to link to the Web page you requested.

I've tried several times; if it is really working, you've got about 10 copies of my database [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

[Derek in NYC]

[ QUOTE ]
Finally, unless someone on the team is already a mid-limit player, there are probably several regular posters you want to consult

[/ QUOTE ]

Isn't Nate in the Chicago area?