The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Posted on November 13, 2012 by Jason Schlachter

I am currently reading this book and it is awesome!  The book is from the point of view of a  teenage autistic boy named Christopher who is trying to figure out who killed his neighbors dog.  The book is smart, clever and I can’t put it down.  This is my favorite quote from Christopher:

“All of the other children at my school are stupid.  Except I’m not meant to call them stupid, even though that is what they are.  I’m meant to say that they have special needs.  But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult and also everyone has special needs, like Father, who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him from getting fat, or Mrs. Peters who wears a beige-colored hearing aid, or Siobhan who has glasses so thick they give you a headache if you borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even though they have special needs.”

 

Oh, and the book has drawings by Christopher of things he wants to tell you about :)

Posted in Live Poker | Leave a comment

Nate Silver is Right(Sort of) and a Hand

Posted on November 9, 2012 by Jason Schlachter

In the last few days before the election, Nate Silver and his statistical analysis(http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/) gave Obama approximately a 90% chance to win.  He was disparaged by many in the media, especially on the conservative side who disagreed with his analysis and who “knew” better.  People like Joe Scarborough called him a “joke” and said he should not be allowed to write until after the election was over.  All this hate over mathematical models?  I am reminded of those baseball players, managers and general managers who did not believe what sabermetrics and the idea of “Moneyball” was telling them until it started working.  To many, Silver is now vindicated because what he predicted came to be true.

To me, Silver is the same person that he always was.  I respect him immensely and love that he has brought this type of analysis to the mainstream.  However, in this case, he made a prediction about the election(with confidence intervals mind you) and he happened to be right.  His sample size for this election is 1, and even he would agree that you need a much larger sample to determine if his modeling is right(I believe it is).  If Romney had won, Silver would have been considered a fool, despite the fact that his models suggested that it would happen about 10% of the time.

A hand I won yesterday gave me similar feelings to the ones I have about Nate Silver.

A bad player($2500) who is playing every hand and never folding preflop or on the flop limps, a good player($2500) who I have played with before raises to $45 and I call($4000) next to act with 33.  A tight player calls behind me and the limper calls.

The pot is $180 and the flop comes Jc4s3c.  The bad player checks and the good player bets $140.  I elect to call for a few reasons.  Firstly, I think there is a lot of money to be had by letting the bad player call the flop(with few outs) which he will do a lot of the time.  If he elects to raise as a bluff, semibluff or with a Jack, I can find myself winning a really big pot having great equity.  I can also trap the good player in there(since he can’t fold to the bad player’s raise) and potentially win a massive pot.  Secondly, I think if I raise the flop, it’s going to be tough to stack the good player when I have represented a good hand and play fairly tight.  Thirdly, noone ever calls with a set there on a drawy board, so he won’t expect me to have one.  The bad player calls as well.

The pot is $600 and the turn comes the 5h.    Both players check to me and I have to decide how much to bet(betting is obviously) the correct play here.  For what its worth, the 5 is a pretty good card because the bad player will call with any pair+straight draw for just about any amount.  It is possible that he hit a gutshot(because he never folds the flop with it) but it is less of a concern.  I bet $425, which is a healthy bet(2/3 pot) and one designed to allow the bad player to call and potentially make a huge mistake on the river(either making a hand that is no good, or picking a bad time to bluff).  Unfortunately, he folds and surprisingly the good player calls.

I am surprised that he called because I thought he would have bet every hand he wanted to continue with, since he wouldn’t want it to risk getting checked around.  In fact, I hadn’t considered him calling, since once he checked, I assumed he was giving up.

The pot is $1450, there is $1900 left and the river is the 8h.  That is a great card since all the draws missed, and I am an overwhelming favorite to have the best hand, since the good player always raises the turn with a better hand than mine.  He checks and I think about how much to bet.  I think that if I bet somewhere in the “normal” value betting range, like $700 he is likely to realize its a value bet and not call too weakly.  I considered betting like $1100, but I think that looks relatively strong as well and while he might call weakly, I think it gets called less often than $700.  I thought for a bit and realized that if he called $1100, he would probably call $1900 with about the same frequency and that it looked a little more like a bluff.   If I had to put percentages on it, the times that he could call(excluding the times he missed a draw and was folding to any bet) were 80% to call $700, 50% to call $1100 and 35% to call $1900.  So the expected values(according to the model I gave and used in real time) are $560, $550 and $665.  In any event, he thought for a very long time and eventually called, I showed my set and won a nice pot.

I was very glad to be called and to have won a such a nice pot.  However, I immediately realized how lucky I was, since my model had him folding 2/3 of the time!  I calculated what I thought was the right play, but over a very small sample size, any slight tweak in the percentage of times he calls can change the model significantly.  Plus, I was in the pursuit of an extra $105 with a $1900 bet, with a sample size of 1!

Just like Nate Silver, you take in all the information you can, make the best model and predict using it.  Whether you are right or wrong over a small sample size is irrelevant to whether or not you did a good job modeling in the first place, despite what everyone thinks.  You just keep on doing a good job and let the numbers fall where they may.

Posted in Live Poker, Poker | Leave a comment

Random Thoughts

Posted on November 5, 2012 by Jason Schlachter

We have survived Sandy and were without power for 5 days.  Our building was relatively unscathed, we had no flooding, and we had great friends(with power and water) who were happy to take us in for a few days.  We consider ourselves lucky.  My parents still have no power, my Grandma’s house (along with most of Long Beach) were pretty badly beaten up and other parts of the city are still recovering.  There is still a lot more work to be done.

As someone who ran the NYC marathon last year, I realize how much effort was involved in putting it together.  It was unfortunate that a giant outpouring of hate for the marathon caused it to be cancelled because that probably tied the hands of the Mayor and New York Road Runners.  They should have done something(either a shorter race or loops around Central Park) to compensate those runners who spent an enormous amount of time training as well as the money to get here(40,000 of the 48,000 runners are from out of town).

The Red Cross is a tremendous organization that does great work and the percentage of dollars that gets translated to aid is outstanding.  I understand their need to raise funds now and to do so while the disaster is fresh in everyone’s minds, but putting all the funds into your general fund to distribute as you see fit is NOT what people think of when they text to donate or send in a check.  No one considers that their funds may not be used to help the current disaster. It’s not right.

Speaking of donations, where is Romney’s PR that can make his events go according to plan and in a positive way? I don’t believe he should be getting the flack that he is for collecting donations of food and clothing(everyone on my Facebook page, and everywhere else is doing it), but can’t he just have an event where he does something and everyone thinks its nice.  He really needs a new PR guy.

Speaking of which, I never really liked Chris Christie because I think he gets a lot of props for “telling it like it is,” which generally amounts to having no tact and offending people.  However, I like the fact that he was not afraid to praise the President when he thought he did a good job.  With the state of politics today, that is rare, and he should be applauded for it.

I don’t know what the rest of the country is like, but no one around here is even talking about the election.  It seems as though any momentum that Romney might have had or been building is lost and I see Nate Silver(a former high stakes poker player) keeps upping the chances of an Obama win(I think it is up to 85% now).

I am halfway done with Imagine by Jonah Lehrer.  I think its very interesting and similar to a lot of books I like about how to improve on things using unconventional and scientific means.  That said, I just googled it and found that he made up some (relatively) unimportant parts of the book and that he has been shunned as a writer and that all of the books were recalled by the publisher.  Oops.

Atlantic city got major flooding and a lot of houses and areas were destroyed.  The casinos seem to be unaffected and the Borgata Fall Open is going on as scheduled, so I will be heading down there tomorrow.  I hope there is a enough action, since I am sure that many of the people who would come to play are dealing with the aftermath of Sandy.  Either way, best of luck to you guys!

Posted in Live Poker | Leave a comment

Bad Projections and the Presidential Debate

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Jason Schlachter

I was reading an article about ancestry.com and I came across this quote, “genealogy is a demographic projected to grow 36% by 2020.”  My first reaction was to laugh at their attempt to predict this sort of thing that far into the future, and as an economics major and a statistics geek, their estimate struck me as having little validity.  Since this article was found in a serious, reputable, finance-centric magazine, it was a little concerning to me.

I mean, how can you predict peoples choices about a minor preferences(such as how they spend a small portion of their free time and money) 8 years into the future?   The simple answer is that you can’t, because there are so many factors that contribute to the growth of an internet business, and so many major influences that will affect it over the coming 8 years.  Technology improves so quickly and consumer preferences and choices change so dramatically that predicting that far into the future is a fools errand.  You can surely make such a prediction, but with numerous unpredictable large (and many small too) events that massively affect the outcome, prediction is pointless.

For example, if you took a presidential poll for the 2020 election, what point would it serve?   Nassim Taleb wrote in Black Swan about how people underestimate the frequency of large influential events.  It is impossible this industry, along with many others, ignore these possibilities.   Perhaps they don’t want to look silly by including how confident they are that a particular prediction or graph will follow form.

With the first presidential debate tonight, you are going to begin hearing even more about the budget and the economy and future projections.  Most of what you hear will be rubbish.  Politicians promise that great things will happen in the future.  They might as well, most of the difficult cuts take place after they are long gone and the results occur when they are not responsible for them.  In addition, their scenarios assume that things will occur in a way that history has shown they are unlikely to do so.

For example, the Democrats assume that they will be able to raise taxes and cap emissions at will and that the Republicans accept their proposals, which recent history has shown to not be the case.  The Republicans are equally as bad in assuming that their trickle down economic theory that advocates tax cuts for the rich will work, without considering the slowdown in the economy from reduction of government jobs.  These things are for someone else to consider, and be responsible for, so that they don’t get their graphs dirty(or wrong).

The candidates job is to get elected and they are willing to say anything to do that, but that does not mean we have to believe them.  So tonight, when you hear Obama or Romney say that their plan will save $X billion dollars by 2030 you should be laughing(and crying too), because it is so disingenuous.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Biggest Differences Between Live Poker and Internet Poker

Posted on October 2, 2012 by Jason Schlachter

When people hear that I am a professional poker player, they usually have a lot of questions for me.  One of the questions that inevitably comes up is about the difference between playing poker in person and on the internet.  Since I have played quite a bit of poker in person over the last 10 years, in addition to playing more hands than just about anyone on the internet, I feel that I have a good grasp on the differences. Here are a few of them:

1.  Hands.  Since things such as dealing and counting chips are automated, play is much, much faster on the internet.  You typically get between 80 and 120 hands per table per hour(depending on the game) on the internet vs. 30 per hour per table in person.  Also, you may choose to play multiple tables on the internet, which allows you to play even more hands as compared to playing in person.  This makes online play more profitable than live play at similar stakes.

2.  Statistics.  Stats are a very important part of poker, and the internet allows you to gather concrete data and analyze it over a more significant sample size.  You can use your data to make better informed decisions about your opponents and use that data in real time.  In live poker, a small sample size and limited time can skew your data gathering and since the data you collect is limited, it can be tougher to get a data set big enough to make concrete judgements about players and situations.

3.  Tells.  In live poker, for the most part, the reading of tells and facial expressions is limited and does not play a big role in the decision making process.  There are times you can get a good tell on someone, but it is usually overruled by the hard data you have collected about the way the particular hand has been played.  The part of reading live tells that is significant are what I call the obvious tells, such as when someone talks about their hand or it is very obvious that they are happy or unhappy with their hand.  This happens far more often than you would think given the amount of money at stake.  On the internet, it is much tougher to get those sorts of “timing” tells, so you rely almost completely on hard data.

4 .  Time.  Playing poker on the internet allows for a much better work/life balance.  I am able to avoid time spent commuting, time spent waiting for games and can be assured of getting a good game whenever it is convenient.  This allows me much more free time to spend with family, friends and other projects.  When playing in person, I have to be at the casino when the games are running, and since I do not live close by, usually stay over for several nights.  This is a big negative for me.

5.  Profitability.  There is no question that playing on the internet is more profitable and more stable for me than playing in person.  The same amount of time spent playing on the internet generates a better and more consistent income for me and allows me to lead a better life then playing in person.

For all the reasons stated above, I am excited for Internet Poker to become legalized and regulated as soon as possible.  It sounds as though this is a likely outcome after the election, and I am waiting as patiently and excitedly for that day.  At that time I plan to return to playing on the internet full time.

Posted in Internet Poker, Live Poker, Poker | Leave a comment