Pokernomics

[djack]

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If you're defending Moneyball, then you may have one more reason to doubt Levitt's ability to carry out this study.

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Yup. His attacks on Billy Beane do give me pause.

[jim leach]

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If you're defending Moneyball, then you may have one more reason to doubt Levitt's ability to carry out this study.

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Yup. His attacks on Billy Beane do give me pause.

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Lol. I was mostly joking in writing that, but I think those posts of his on his blog did get a ton of similar responses to yours. At least, based on the subseqent posts along those lines, that seems the case.

[djack]

It's not just the moneyball/billy beane attack -- where I think he was offbase, because the point was market inefficiences in player valuation -- but other things too. There's also the real estate study, which Arnold Kling critiqued.

I guess my objection is that Levitt seems to think he can just go in to things, learn some basics and make conclusions based on data. Unfortunately, sometimes more knowledge is needed in order to understand what the data is trying to tell you. Levitt should really hire Ed Miller or King Yao, who would both probably be interested and flattered.

(and am I the only one who really wishes King Yao were teaching me to bet sports?)

[disjunction]

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2. I think drawing reliable conclusions about the complex stuff that we'd like to see addressed will be really hard, much harder than it sounds. I liken the complexity of the problem to that of speech recognition or natural language.

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Exactly. My first reaction is that he will produce a nice playbook for what to do against a certain VPIP/PFR player after a certain flop, but the result will be kind of a "static" strategy which misses the rock/paper/scissors aspect of poker.

[Edit: Not to imply that he won't say anything interesting, or do bad science. More that he'll only be able to tackle a small piece of a difficult problem. I'd compare it to some of the old Peter_Rus math posts.]

[Matt Ruff]

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Brilliant minds have been pouring over natural language data for decades

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Now there's a lovely image to contemplate during breakfast.

-- M. Ruff

[Nottom]

I sent him about 200K HHs, I don't really care about what he tells me, becasue a) most of these are older HHs (I've been playing mostly SNGs for the past 6 mos) b) I just wanted a free book.

[imported_ncray]

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I sent him about 200K HHs, I don't really care about what he tells me, becasue a) most of these are older HHs (I've been playing mostly SNGs for the past 6 mos) b) I just wanted a free book.

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Same. A free book would be sweet.

[vulturesrow]

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b) I just wanted a free book.

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[imported_ncray]

We could hope that one of the peer-reviewers is a 2+2er.

[sfer]

It will almost certainly not be a book but rather a paper with very generalized findings.