Figure I'll throw up a post on my favorite holiday of the year. I'm very lucky to spend it with my maternal family every year, which is only 6 people, none of whom I dislike. It's also nice to celebrate a holiday that puts an emphasis on thankfulness with minimal religious undertones.
Speaking of which, I have a lot to be thankful for in life and in poker right now. I've been figuring out a nice balance between work and play and reaping the rewards - I'm almost never bored, even when I get some alone time (which I think I need more of than most people), and I'm just at a pretty high level of overall happiness.
It doesn't hurt that I've been running cleaner than the dishwasher at my 10/25 and 25/50 "shots" this month. I put shots in quotes because those will most likely make up the bulk of my play for the foreseeable future. The combination of my confidence in these lineups and the fact that the 5/10-10/20NL games at the casino closest to me has run less and less means I'm going to focus on those games unless I go on a really improbable and terrible run.
An awesome Hoss_TBF interview that I came across on twitter: http://www.highstakesdb.com/3437-interview-with-matt-hosstbf-hawrilenko.aspx
I'm pretty in awe of the guys who take a similar approach to the game as I do and are just way better at it. Like, I can accept that some people just think differently about the game than I do and that makes them better at some things that I'm weaker at, but when somebody beats you at your own thing and is clearly smarter than you it's a feeling of half amazement half frustration.
Also RGIII is really good.
...you're gonna have a bad time
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Sunday, September 2, 2012
Even at 25, ya gotta start sometime
Now that I've decided to play poker full time for the foreseeable future, I've been able to get my head out of my ass and start doing smart and productive things instead of wondering what to do next. One of those smart and productive things is opening a brokerage account and "managing" it myself instead of leaving it in money market accounts/CDs/under my mattress. I put "managing" in quotes because if you just put money into index funds and mutual funds who's risk/return aligns with your interests, there really isn't any managing to do. I'm really glad a good friend of mine kept pestering me to do this. I was missing out on tons of free money because I'm a dumb idiot.
Learning how to save (beyond your bankroll) is very important for full time poker players because of the uncertainty and lack of good alternatives in the future that come with the job if you aren't making a LOT of money. Compound interest is really powerful, and its power decreases the longer you wait. If a 25 year-old starts putting $5,000/year into a relatively risky (which, long-term, really isn't that risky) account earning 10%/year, they end up with $822,470.11 when they're 55 years old. If the 25 year-old is able to just throw $50,000 into that account and never touches it and never saves anything else, it will be worth $872,470.11 in 30 years.
In other news, I just passed 500 hours of live poker played since I graduated May 20th, working out to almost 40 hours/week. 500 hours at 25 hands/hour works out to 12,515 hands, which is about the same amount of hands I would play per week when I was playing online full-time. of course my $/hand is much higher live, and it's easier to put in more hours live, but still. lolive.
Sunday, July 29, 2012
On Societal Contribution
A week ago, I attended my 2nd
cousin’s wedding. It was a great event, and I’m really happy for him and his
wife. I only really see the family on my father’s side once every couple years
or so, so I don’t have a close relationship with any of them. Anyway, the groom’s
father is a pastor. At the end of dinner I went to congratulate him and say
goodbye, and the first words to come out of his mouth when I shook his hand were,
“Cut out the gambling. I don’t care how much money you make from it, you’re
smart enough to do something better than that.” How amiable. I congratulated
him and left after saying a couple more goodbyes.
It made me pretty angry that that was
all he had to say to me, and after leaving I realized that he hadn’t talked to
me all day even though he had checked up on my brother and sister. After I got
over that, I got to thinking about whether I contribute less to society than I
would with a more conventional job. I can think of two realistic ways one’s
work can benefit society:
1.
Goods or services
produced/provided while working
2.
Unselfish use of
income (or knowledge, or whatever other gains)
Occupations
like farming, construction, or teaching (I feel like the Christian community views
pastors much the same as teachers) are really obvious examples of occupations
that provide a beneficial good or service. On the opposite end of the spectrum,
poker pros don’t really provide a good or service. You could argue that a poker
pro provides entertainment in the same way an artist or a performer does, but whatever.
Some will
argue that poker pros are, in part, responsible for the gambling addictions of
others and actively make the world a worse place, like illegal drug dealers. I
disagree. How about video game developers? Should we outlaw video games because
they’re responsible for burn out gamers who didn’t live up to their potential? Movie
producers? Plenty of people forego school and work so they can chase the dream
of being a star actor.
The more
money one makes at their job, the more they have to spare on others. Even if
you don’t donate to charities or support small businesses that you couldn’t
support if you were poorer, you are still contributing through something that’s
mandatory: income tax. So now the question arises: how much more income tax
does one have to pay to overcome the effective societal burden of not producing
or providing anything?
If I were
working in finance or data analysis or something, I wouldn’t be paying much in
taxes compared to what I’m paying now. I’d be making a contribution to society
with my work, but it’s really hard to calculate how much. Imagine I decide to
only play poker for the next 5 years, and end up giving the government $100k more
in income tax than I would doing something else.
In 2012,
the U.S. is spending the most on Social Security ($610B), Homeland Security
($499B), and Health and Human Services ($315B) (usaspending.gov). In total, the
U.S. will be spending $3.7T in 2012. So that’s 16% on SS, 13.5% on security,
and 8.5% on medical. Over those 5 years, I’d be contributing an additional $16,000 to social security,
$13,500 to homeland security, and $8,500 on medical spending, along with
whatever else the government decides to use the other $62,000 on. Is that more
of a contribution to society than I would’ve made with the services I’d have
provided had I done something else? I don’t know.
I’m not
saying everyone should aim to make as much money as possible, or proclaiming
that poker is more altruistic than teaching (lol?). I’m only trying to debunk
the notion that gambling is an evil occupation that hurts our society. Even poker
pros who aren’t as capable as others, and definitively contribute less than
they would at a more conventional job, shouldn’t be made villains. What happened
to doing something you enjoy for a living? Is that only okay if it’s something less
taboo than gambling? What about other entertainment providers like fiction authors
or actors, are they selfish? Where do you draw the line? Is it not completely
arbitrary?
Comments
welcome. Would love to discuss this more.
John
Sunday, July 15, 2012
GTO River Bet Sizing
Game theory. People don’t get it. I don’t really get it, but I probably
get it more than 90%+ of poker pros. Part of becoming good at something is
being humble enough to realize you suck and don’t know anything. The
inspiration for this post can be found here:
where almost nobody gives a reason for their preferred bet size beyond “oh
just bet what he calls duehh”. Let’s try to figure out the most profitable optimal
betting strategy is for a similar situation, that is, a betting strategy that
doesn’t let our opponent improve by deviating from his optimal strategy and
that makes us the most money. If the players are bluffing and
calling with optimal frequencies, the 1-period (as opposed to multiple periods)
“game” of this river situation is in equilibrium and neither player can improve
by changing their play.
There’s not really a need for a hand history, so I’ll just describe the
hypothetical situation:
1.
There is $100 in the pot on the river.
2.
The players both have $200 remaining in their
stacks.
3.
Villain is first to act and checks. Villain’s hand
range is entirely made up of “bluff catchers”, or hands that beat all of hero’s
bluffs and lose to all of hero’s value bets. Villain only ever calls or folds
on the river.
4.
Hero gets to the river with 40 made hands that
beat all of villain’s hands, and 60 missed draws that lose to all of villain’s
hands. He needs to choose a bluff % and a bet amount.
Any equilibrium strategy for hero will result in villain being indifferent
between calling and folding, meaning villain will call 50% of the time and fold
50% of the time. Let’s look at what that means from villain’s perspective.
The most villain ever has to win to call a bet is 50% of the time. If
someone bets $100 into a $0 pot, you must have the best hand 50% of the time to
call and break even. If someone bets pot, you must have the best hand 33% of
the time to call and break even (.33*200 + .66*-100 = 0). If someone bets half
pot, you need the best hand a quarter of the time, etc.
Now we’ll examine the EV of different bet sizes. Let’s start with a
half pot bet. If we decide that half pot ($50) will be our bet size, we need to
have a betting range containing 75% value hands and 25% bluffs to make villain
indifferent between calling and folding. Since only 40% of our
getting-to-the-river range is made up of value hands, now we figure out what 40
is 75% of and fill the rest in with bluffs. 40/.75 = 53.333. Round that to 53…53-40
= 13 bluffs. If we bet half pot with 40 value hands and 13 bluffs, player B
makes the same amount of money calling as he does folding: $0. With the other
47 bluffs, we have to just check back and lose, or else villain can call every
time.
Half pot bet
Villain EV for calling = .25*150
+ .75*-50 = $0 = villain EV for folding
.75*-50 is the probability that we lose the pot times the amount we
lose. .25*150 is the probability that we win the pot times the amount we win.
It’s slightly more complicated to calculate hero’s EV for playing this
strategy. Four things can happen:
1.
Bet, get called, win
2.
Bet, get called, lose
3.
Bet, villain folds
4.
Check and lose
We’re checking and losing with 47 hands (also 47% of our range) so that
part is easy: .47*0 = 0. When we bet, which we do 53% of the time, we know that
villain folds half of the time: .5*.53*100 = +26.5. The other half of the time
we bet, he calls. 75% of the time he calls, we win, and 25% of the time he
calls, we lose. .5*.53*(.75*150 + .25*-50) = +26.5.
Hero EV for this strategy =
.47*0 (check back) + .5*.53*100 (bet, fold) + .5*.53*(.75*150 + .25*-50) (bet,
call) = +$53
Just as a demonstration, let’s see what happens if we decide to bluff
more and villain changes his strategy to calling every time. Let’s say we
decide to value bet 40 hands, bluff 40 hands, and check back 20 hands.
Villain EV for calling every time vs. new strategy = .5*150 + .5*-50 =
+$50.
Hero EV for new half pot strategy that lets villain call every time = .2*0
(check back) + .8*(.5*150 + .5*-50) (bet, call) = +$40.
So when we deviate from optimal bluffing frequency and start bluffing
too much against a perfect villain, villain’s EV goes from $0 to +$50, and ours
goes from +$53 to +$40. Our reaction to him calling every time would be to
bluff less and less until we end up back in the first situation.
Let’s move on to different bet sizes. For a full pot bet, villain is
indifferent between calling and folding when he has the best hand 33% of the
time, so player A will be bluffing 33% of the time. 40/.66 = 60, so our betting
range will be made up of all 40 value hands as well as 20 bluffs. We check back
40 missed draws.
Full pot bet
Villain EV = .33*200 + .66*-100
= $0
Hero EV = .4*0 (check back) +
.5*.6*100 (bet, fold) + .5*.6*(.66*200 + .33*-100) (bet, call) = +$60
Looks like against a perfect player, in this specific bluff catching
scenario, a full pot betting strategy wins more than a half pot strategy. Let’s
look at all in for 2x pot now. Villain needs to put $200 in to win the $300
sitting in the middle, so he needs to win 40% of the time to break even on a
call. 40/.6 = 67, so hero will be value betting 40 hands, bluffing 27 hands,
and checking back 33 hands.
2x pot bet
Villain EV = .4*300 + .6*-200 =
$0
Hero EV = .33*0 (check back) +
.5*.67*100 (bet, fold) + .5*.67*(.6*300 + .4*-200) (bet, call) = +$67
Betting as large as possible yields the biggest profit against a perfect
opponent in this situation. When I figure out GTO (game theory optimal) solutions like this, I like
to use them as starting points in my thought process in real situations, and
adjust according to mistakes I believe my opponent will make. If I’m playing
against someone who will call a large bet too often in this spot because lots
of draws missed, I will still bet as big as possible but will check back all of
my bluffs. If I’m playing against a very good player who may call and may fold,
I simply revert back to GTO strategy and become unexploitable. If I’m bluffing
an optimal frequency for my chosen bet size, the very good player can’t do
anything to win money against me. I don’t care how much he calls or folds, he’s
still not beating me for more money by adjusting his play.
Sometimes in a real game, you can’t make such rock solid assumptions.
If I’m betting $1,000 into a $100 pot it could go from optimal to a massive
losing play if there’s any chance my opponent slowplayed a monster hand (one
that beats some or all of my value betting hands). Most situations aren't as clear cut as in this example. Sometimes the villain check/raises, sometimes villain has monsters, air, and mediocre hands all in his range, etc.
That’s it for now. Any feedback is appreciated.
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