how good can you be at tournament poker?

[billb]

Paul how did you hone your poker skill? I know you were born with the luck portion.

[Ed Miller]

I didnt know paul went to MIT.

His sister did. That's close enough. [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

[vegasone]

[ QUOTE ]

* I'll let you pick some number of players. If a single one of those players wins a bracelet at the 2005 WSOP, you win the bet. How many players do you need to list before you are a favorite in this bet?


[/ QUOTE ]

i'll take a sniff at this one, as i don't recall much on it from the original thread on RGP, back when Tom Weideman first posted this line of thinking.

my best guess is about 25.

after reviewing the results of the fantasy pools that daniel n. ran in rgp, it seems that with 20 selections, many people didn't have a bracelet winner on their team. (checking which players were chosen, and how often)
add increasing entries, and my best guess is that 20 wouldn't be sufficient.
for the upper limit, with 30+ selections a higher than 50/50 shot seems likely.

[FeliciaLee]

Hi, Paul. Glad to see you here! I love your journal (long time reader).

Just out of curiosity, are you speaking of all tournament games, or solely NLHE?

Felicia [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]
www.felicialee.net

[Smasharoo]

First, you move this all the way down here, then you state the "obvious"


Yet you still seemed to find it! A tribute to either your dilligence or megalomania.


Reread Paul's post, that my reply was originally to, then reinterpret "possible" as something other than the mathematically possible but incredibly tiny mathematical chance of that happening.


I understood it the first time, thanks. I stated the obvious because it seemed you weren't grasping it completely. If you were asking what the likelyhood of seeing 1,000,000 heads in 1,000,000 flips is, I imagine you could do that math yourself fairly easily.

If you were asking what a "reasonable" number of consecutive heads would be, you'd have to define reasonable first. If you said a 1 in 100 likelyhood was reasonable enough, then it's around 7 in a row.

[Easy E]

[ QUOTE ]

First, you move this all the way down here, then you state the "obvious"


Yet you still seemed to find it! A tribute to either your dilligence or megalomania.

[/ QUOTE ]

well, I had to go hunting to find where you'd moved this from... so I'm claiming diligence.

[ QUOTE ]


Reread Paul's post, that my reply was originally to, then reinterpret "possible" as something other than the mathematically possible but incredibly tiny mathematical chance of that happening.


I understood it the first time, thanks. I stated the obvious because it seemed you weren't grasping it completely. If you were asking what the likelyhood of seeing 1,000,000 heads in 1,000,000 flips is, I imagine you could do that math yourself fairly easily.

If you were asking what a "reasonable" number of consecutive heads would be, you'd have to define reasonable first. If you said a 1 in 100 likelyhood was reasonable enough, then it's around 7 in a row.

[/ QUOTE ]

That was the original point of my QUESTION (well, one point anyway)


Okay, let's be specific about what was actually intended before you have me pictured, drooling in the corner, playing with my toes (I save that for Friday nights)

<font color="red">If you knew you weren't being set up or hustled somehow and saw a coin flipped the same way fifty times in a row, wouldn't you be willing to give some pretty freaking long odds that it's going the same way next time too? I should hope so! </font>

Which led to this "rebuttal" by Mr Megalomania

<font color="blue"> if a coin flip is 50:50, how long of a streak of consecutive heads would you have to see (when you have no direct reason to suspect a rigged coin or toss) before you would ignore the 50:50 probability and bet on the ongoing streak by laying "pretty freaking long odds" on heads on the next toss, or series of tosses?

How long a streak is so long as to be considered almost impossible to occur? And therefore it can be discounted?

Or, in other words- what is the longest "possible" consecutive heads result in a series of 1,000,000 coin flips? </font>

See, possible was in quotes for a reason...

[Easy E]

I'm glad SOMEONE truly gets it! I was worried about myself there for a while.

However, your reasoning is a bit off:
[ QUOTE ]

I guess DH shouldn't even bother to enter the next WSOP. This is because his success in the past two WSOP's means that he has 'used-up' his good luck and now HAS to finish below average in order to 'balance-out' his results.

[/ QUOTE ]

No, if Dan wants to win one, or get to the final table again, he's forced to get some of his losses out of the way. Besides, I may be wrong and he's actually only 50:1 to get to the final table again- so it could happen much sooner than expected!
I'm still not sure if burning up some losses in WPT events actually works or not- more research is needed.

[ QUOTE ]
Since some cosmic force was looking out for DH in the past two he needs to get out while he can because the evil-karma is now out to get him.

[/ QUOTE ]

See, now you're confusing me! This absolutely brilliant deduction doesn't gibe with your confused logic in the first part. Maybe you're bipolar... tell the other half to stop screwing up in the "3+1" picks!

[Smasharoo]

I see. You more asking Paul what his definition of "reasonable" would be. Poor reading comprehention skills on my part, likely. What I get for four tabling and reading forums.

[Easy E]

And yet, that's what I am arguing to a certain extent.

<font color="blue"> It's like saying that a player with an expectation of 2 BB/100 who has won 3 BB/100 over his last 1000 hands should expect to win at a rate of 1 BB/100 over his next 1000. The player's expectation is still 2 BB/100. Note that if the player wins 2 BB/100 over his next 1000 hands, then he has won 2.5 BB/100 over his last 2000 hands </font>

Okay, how did we get to the certainty that this player's "expectation is still 2 BB/100"? Unless s/he is the world's most freakishly consistant player, winning exactly 0.02 bets in cash on every single hand, expectation is based on an average of their results . Therefore, this 2BB expectation is based on 1 BB/100 streaks and 3 BB/100 streaks and -5BB/100 streaks and so on, combining in their results over time. THIS is what allows us to declare them a "2 BB/100 expectation player."

If we are saying that "The player's expectation is still 2 BB/100" as a central truth to this- this player isn't really a 2.5 BB/100 or 1.75 BB /100 player, with skewed short-term results now- then that 2 BB/100 value is essentially a <font color="green">
"mean (mn)
n.

1)Something having a position, quality, or condition midway between extremes; a medium.
2) A number that typifies a set of numbers, such as a geometric mean or an arithmetic mean. "

"arithmetic mean
n.
The value obtained by dividing the sum of a set of quantities by the number of quantities in the set. Also called average." </font>

If I expect to win 1 out of a thousand times and I can somehow treat this as a hard valid number , then shouldn't I expect a large number of losses pretty soon?

Call it gambler's fallacy if you'd like (the "Easy E effect" has a nice ring to it) but:

a) given that streaks have no proven predictability power if we assume our initial BB mean is fairly accurate and not in flux
b) I'd be willing to gamble and give slightly greater odds on short-term future results with a stop-loss (before y'all start salivating again!) based on my knowledge of recent events.

Specifically, I'd bet at 10% worse odds than normal that Dan Harrington wouldn't make the final table in the 2005 $10K, based partially on the fact that he's been to the last two (along with a whole host of other factors). And, if you'd read my other posts in this thread in a similar vein, you will remember this:
<font color="red"> "And yes, I know I'd be taking the worst of this bet... and I'd still gamble on it. " </font> because I'm willing to gamble in a limited manner on this fallacy of regression to the (estimated) mean.

[b]<font color="orange">[i] This, of course, opens the resulting corollary- If Action Dan DOES get to the final table in 2005.... then forget all about "Jesus"- Dan H is the god of tournament poker!

[daryn]

easy e, didn't you have a "craps system" before? was that you or another guy? that was a pretty funny thread, but then i realized you were serious [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]