
Matt Maroon:  Why I Quit Playing Poker For A Living - rms
http://www.thepokerchronicles.com/archives/000947.html
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gregwebs
Matt's implication that poker is more complex than chess is entirely
unfounded. Computer scientists have been trying to create the best chess
programs since the days of the first computer as a test of artificial
intelligence. Poker has been ignored because a computer can easily figure out
the odds (figuring out the strategy is the hard part), and it was never as
popular as it is now. I would expect that a computer will be the best poker
player in the world in a few years, one is already close now.
<http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9750210-7.html>

Phil Laak (one of the best) didn't start playing poker seriously until he was
25. Contrast this with chess, where if you didn't start studying by the age of
ten for hours every day, you don't have a chance at being the best.

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mattmaroon
You are very incorrect. Here's where you're wrong:

1\. Phil Laak is not one of the best poker players. Not even top 100. The fact
that you think he is shows how little you know about poker. Also, I don't even
know who Ali Esmali is.

2\. The game (which I think was No Limit Hold'em) played was the simplest form
of poker for a machine. Even if one became better at this than humans (which
probably is possible in the not too distant future) it will be far from
beating a 2-7 Triple Draw player.

3\. Figuring out odds is trivial, but virtually useless. Figuring out odds as
well as a human, who has the ability to put his opponent on a range of
holdings, is not.

4\. No poker bot ever made could come anywhere close to me in an 8 man, limit
hold'em match, and there are far better players than me.

5\. I don't know if chess has had more man hours dedicated to it. It probably
has. But Polaris has been worked on for 26 years. That's certainly not
insignificant. Phil Laak has probably been playing for 10 or so.

6\. I'm a mediocre programmer at best but could easily write a chess program
that, with infinite processing power, would be perfect. (I'm not sure if it
would be unbeatable, as it is possible that with perfect play one side will
always win.) I could not do that with poker.

7\. Chess may be harder to learn for a human (though even there I'm not sure)
but that doesn't mean it is also harder for a machine. Calculating the 18th
power of 2 is harder for a human than picking out an apple from a group of
pictures. Not the same for my PC.

~~~
tlrobinson
_6\. I'm a mediocre programmer at best but could easily write a chess program
that, with infinite processing power, would be perfect._

Yeah, IF you had infinite processing power, it would be a nearly trivial
exhaustive search program. IF I had a way to read my opponents emotions, etc
like humans can, then I could write a fairly trivial program to do well at
poker. But those are two very big "IF"s.

The problem is the two games are _very_ different. Chess is a game of perfect
information, where both players know the entire state of the game. Poker is
not, plus it has an element of chance.

You can't really compare the two.

~~~
yters
I'd say you can in terms of how knowledge plays a role in the game. In chess,
the computer can calculate the best move given a situation. It doesn't need to
know anything about the opponents strategy. In poker, it is pretty much the
opposite. Your move depends partially on purely deterministic criteria, what
people likely have, but more so on what you think everyone else thinks. Here
you enter a realm I'd say computers are inherently bad at.

This, I think, is what mattmaroon is getting at.

~~~
tlrobinson
What I meant was you can't really compare the "easiness" of the two for humans
based how well a computer would do. Computers are theoretically good at chess,
and theoretically bad at poker, but that says _nothing_ about how easy or hard
the two are for humans.

You can't say that A is easier than B for humans just because a computer can
do A well but not B. For example, computers are excellent at doing large
calculations very fast but terrible at recognizing objects in a scene
visually, but humans are the exact opposite.

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edw519
No matter how well you do something, sooner or later you reach the point where
you question the value you are producing for others.

This sorta reminds me of the guy who got paid a fortune to dig holes in the
beach, only to see them filled in by the ocean each night. No matter; he just
got paid to dig them again the next day. Wasn't long before he thought, "This
doesn't make any sense - I wanna build something that lasts and that others
can use."

I wonder how big a role this kind of thinking played. The fact that you're
part of ycombinator suggests that it's > 0.

~~~
mattmaroon
Little to none, though I'll cover that in a later part.

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vegashacker
I was hoping for a few juicy poker details, but, that aside, thanks for the
very honest and engaging post.

~~~
mattmaroon
What sort?

~~~
greendestiny
I've always been curious as to whether the whole reading people thing was
exaggerated for the tourists. I'm sure poker strategy is a lot about trying to
gauge what an opponent is doing, but does it really come down to people
scratching their noses funny?

I used to play soccer quite a lot, and playing well is a lot about knowing
whether both your players and their players are going to go. The thing is
though that it has nothing to do with explicit tells - its all about the
geometry, the state of the game and how they are playing.

I've always though past a certain level there would just be no way a poker
player was going to reliably give themselves away.

~~~
mattmaroon
Reading people is what poker is all about, but tells (mannerisms) are overly
emphasized to a large degree in the media. They really aren't much a of a
factor once you move beyond total amateurs, though at the same time, a
relatively large % of the players you run into at the WSOP main event are
playing their first live tournament anymore.

Really, though, it's more about observing how your opponent plays (both long
term and short) and putting him on a range of holdings.

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mwerty
sounds a lot like trading.

~~~
utnick
the cool thing about poker v trading though is you need solid 6 figure
bankroll to make a stable living trading, you can start poker with a few K or
less

~~~
mattmaroon
Online you could turn a $2k bankroll into six figures in a year, and it's
actually fairly easy.

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mwerty
fairly easy? How do I go about doing this?

Edit: Never mind - realized this does not scale.

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mattmaroon
It's pretty easy really, and nothing secret. Read good books. Practice.
Discuss with friends. Start off low, build your way up using proper bankroll
management (which is found in said books).

~~~
pfedor
Would you care to elaborate? Which books are good? What kind of practice? I'm
sure many here are interested.

Thanks.

~~~
mattmaroon
You can see my list of recommended books on my blog. They really are the books
I endorse.

