> After watching Michelson play bridge for a while, you could predict more or less the kind of mistake he would make, and it was not unrelated to the American champion’s description of his chess game. He would make a bid short of game, but, after getting the bid, would see that, if he took and made two long finesses, he could come in with a little slam. Of course, a little slam would make only a few points difference since he hadn’t bid it, but he would take the two finesses and not only lose both but lose his bid on an absolutely “lay-down hand.” He was a rather small man, as you know, and he would look with almost childlike incredulity at the ruined remains of his daring invention of two long finesses where none was a sure thing.
If anybody needs translation:
In bridge you bid how many tricks you will take; there are 13 tricks and the minimum bid is 7 (i.e. you will take over half). If you make at least as many as you bid, your score is positive, if you make fewer than you bid your score is negative. You get bonus points for bidding at a certain level; "game" is 9-11 tricks depending on the situation (10 tricks is the most common for reasons I won't get into here). "small slam" (or little slam in this article) is 12 tricks and "grand slam" is 13 tricks.
You have two opponents in bridge and a finesse is a play that depends on cards being in the correct opponents hand. Most common is which opponent holds a king when you have an ace and a queen. If you can force them to decide to play the king or not before you play, then you beat the king with an ace, or beat the lower card they play with the queen. A "long finesse" (called a "deep finesse" today) requires more than one card to be in the correct position, so attempting one is a move of last resort.
Now the translation. He bid to make 9 or 10 tricks, but saw that he could make 12 tricks if all of the cards were in the position maximally lucky for him. Since he did not bid high enough to get the bonus for winning those, the reward is tiny, and he should just make the obvious plays to cover his bid. Instead he took the risky play and ended up not even making the 9 or 10 that he bid. This is the sort of mistake that even an intermediate bridge player learns not to make very quickly, but a beginner couldn't make this mistake at all because they wouldn't see the opportunity. So Michelson is smart but a terrible bridge player.
I'm struggling to think of an equivalently bad play in poker; maybe staying in the pot when your hand is the low-pair after the flop and several others have already called?
A potential poker analogy is probably just getting lost in leveling games.
Level 0: My opponent made a large bet because he has a strong hand. I should fold.
Level 1: My opponent made a large bet because he knows that I will think it looks like he has a strong hand, when in fact he has a weak hand. I should call.
Level 2: My opponent knows that I think his large bets are bluffs, so he is now making a large bet assuming that I will wrongly assume he is bluffing. I should fold.
Level N: (if N is odd, I should call; if N is even, I should fold)
Beginner players will only think at level 0 or 1, but intermediate/advanced players may sometimes end up "leveling" themselves into a bad decision.
Also called the "Iocaine Powder" strategy in Rock Paper Scissors (RoShamBo) [1]. The question being, how many "levels" of meta is optimal given the opponent(s) involved?
RoShamBo strategies attempt to predict what the opponent will do. Given a successful prediction, it is easy to defeat the opponent (if you know they will play rock, you play paper). However, straightforward prediction will often fail; the opponent may not be vulnerable to prediction, or worse, they might have anticipated your predictive logic and played accordingly. Iocaine Powder's meta-strategy expands any predictive algorithm P into six possible strategies:
P.0: naive application
Assume the opponent is vulnerable to prediction by P; predict their next move, and play to beat it. If P predicts your opponent will play rock, play paper to cover rock. This is the obvious application of P.
P.1: defeat second-guessing
Assume the opponent thinks you will use P.0. If P predicts rock, P.0 would play paper to cover rock, but the opponent could anticipate this move and play scissors to cut paper. Instead, you play rock to dull scissors.
P.2: defeat triple-guessing
Assume the opponent thinks you will use P.1. Your opponent thinks you will play rock to dull the scissors they would have played to cut the paper you would have played to cover the rock P would have predicted, so they will play paper to cover your rock. But you one-up them, playing scissors to cut their paper.
At this point, you should be getting weary of the endless chain. "We could second-guess each other forever," you say. But no; because of the nature of RoShamBo, P.3 recommends you play paper -- just like P.0! So we're only left with these three strategies, each of which will suggest a different alternative. (This may not seem useful to you, but have patience.)
I was scrolling through and thinking of RPS exactly. Very interesting post.
I once played my younger brother to 50 wins (whoever got there first was the unquestioned champion of RPS). It got very, very meta and there was drama in every round. We would pace around planning the next move and then meet up and shoot. An unexpected outcome after that much planning and pressure created some hilarity.
Long story short, I beat him 50-28, so I do feel I was out leveling/reading him to some degree. Maybe some obvious pattern I picked up on but didn't notice.
My brother and I would play a variation of rock, paper, scissors, where, prior to making a play, you'd have to tell the other person what you would play though lying was acceptable. We felt like it added a psychological dimension to the game - but I'm not really sure how it affected play. Neither of us could reliably detect when the other was lying.
I feel like this could be the basis of an interesting, what, Comedy Central show maybe? Get two semi-famous people together every week. Have them play RPS to 10 or 20 wins. Just enough to get to the meta mind games and drama but not long enough to drag on.
Maybe design some kind of goofy little arena for them. Let them dress up in costumes. Put some medium stakes charity donation on the line. An announcer and color commentator calling the match.
I wanna see Ken Jennings take on Annie Duke. Dennis Rodman battle Sebastian Bach.
The escape hatch is deciding based on some pseudo-random criteria in your vicinity. This also reminds me of the TNG episode Peak Performance where Data starts going down this meta rabbit hole.
Can't remember the source, but using the nasal cycle[1] as a source of randomness has been suggested before. The only drawback is the cycle length is on the order of 30 min to 6h so drawing more then 1bit/day is probably infeasible.
The best players will avoid trying to make an exploitative decision (e.g. guessing the correct level the opponent is thinking on), and instead make something approaching a game-theoretically optimal one (e.g. a maximally unexploitable strategy).
For example, if you're facing a big bet where you can only beat bluffs (e.g. all missed draws), but lose to any value bets (e.g. sets, straights, flushes), then you'll need to mainly be folding, but to avoid being exploitable you'll also need to call down with some percentage of these mid-strength hands (where the exact number depends on the bet size relative to the pot).
To decide which bluff-catchers you want to call down with, you'll want to pick hands that don't block any of your opponent's bluffs (e.g. you don't want to be holding the Ace of Spades on a flop that had two spades but a third didn't come by the river, since having this card eliminates a number of likely missed flush draws that your opponent might be bluffing with). In addition, you'll also want to pick hands that DO block some of your opponents value bets (e.g. your hand contains one or two cards that block your opponent from having straights, flushes, sets).
Naturally, calling down with the correct ratios is rather hard and only the best players can do so with any consistency, but it does remove the whole levelling guess work and reduces the decision to something you can reason about.
At higher levels, assume they are playing optimally and betting the strength of their hand, with maybe 5-10% bluffs (including some deviation above and below the true strength of their hand) thrown in to gain an edge.
It depends on many factors that can be mainly categorized in personal experience with the player(s), position and range:
Personal experience: Are you playing against a good player? Bad players tend to make very wonky decision, which makes it harder to make good assumptions on what they are playing. In that case, you play by the book on probabilities, because over time you will make more money. There's also "tighter" and "loser" players, who will bet more/less respectively with better or worse hands. Finally you could have a tell or a feel for a player you know for a while.
Position: Betting is highly dependend on the relative position he has at the table. Let's consider two situations, both pre-flop, with five players at the table: First situation, the person after the small blind bets a largre amount. He still has 3 people "behind" him, where he has 0 information on what they are going to do. They could re-raise him, call or fold. He puts himself in a very risky situation by handing over control to the people "that have position" on him.
Second situation, the same player makes a raise as the big blind. In this situation, everyone before him either folded or called, implying they don't have strong hands. He can use this situation to push more people out of the pot, or prepare for a larger bet on the flop. ("Preparing" in the sense that a larger pot makes it more difficult for people to fold to bets. If you have a flush draw and are supposed to pay 20€ to see the next card, the value is very different if it is a 40€ or 200€ pot).
Range: This is the trickiest and coolest part of playing poker. Basically you are trying to find out what cards your opponent holds so you can make a better decision. At the same time, you would like to conceal what cards you hold yourself. Consider the two situations from before: A large bet in second position does imply 1 thing: You probably don't want many players to join for the flop. This in return implies you have something good, that could easily get overturned if someone hits a flop. Small Pairs are very likely. In the second situation, it is much more difficult to limit your range. You are defending the big blind, so you're already invested. You are either raising for value because you have a strong hand (AK, AQ, 89 suited etc.). Or you realized no one raised so you want to "act" as if you have a strong hand, potentially steal the blinds or set yourself up for a later bluff.
> I'm struggling to think of an equivalently bad play in poker
I think you have to include the element of changing strategy. Something like you open with possibility of strong pair(s) bu t don't flop them, now you are going for an unlikely straight against betting that suggests you shouldn't. The EV on pot doesn't make sense but you stay in?
It's hard to have smartdumb plays like that in poker in quite the same way. I guess it would be closer to AK suited in hand with a Q 10 suited and off suit Q and 3 people raising on each round. Then on the turn and river you get an off suit K and a meaningless card.
Your hand is good, with the former possibility of being the nuts, but there's also a chance that someone out there is holding Q (or possibly QQ) of a straight and you're dead already.
This just sounds like a player trying to create “brilliancy” game rather than make best moves. Not sure if they’re just bored by mundane best moves, but it often results in quite a selfish way to play I would say. Money stakes often help, but there are players that are not stopped even by that, but then at least you’re getting payed.
> In 1928 what he was best at was getting the three balls close together and then “nursing” them—that is, making long runs by keeping the balls together with a soft, delicate stroke.
This means that the game is "English Billiards" with the pockets. A delicate stroke won't help in the "no-pocket billiards" as a valid shot needs to hit (atleast) 3 cushions.
Is it usual to play US billiards on a pool-sized table?
I've played a fair bit of snooker and billiards (English billiards in US terms), and it's always been played on a full size snooker table. That's 12ft by 6ft.
The preferred version her is 3-cushion. 3 balls, no pockets, the cue ball has to hit the other 2, but has to hit 3 cushions before touching the 3rd ball.
I wonder why there are so few billiard (Russian billiard) [0] places in US? When I lived in Ukraine, where I'm originally from, we usually got together with friends/co-workers to play billiard after work and it was a hell lot of fun. There were usually 10-15 billiard tables for adults and 1-2 pool tables for children. For comparison, this is the size of a pocket in Russian billiard [1]. When I moved to US, we had a few team outing events at a pool hall and the game was pretty boring (at least to me). I could easily pocket all the balls without giving a chance for the other players to even start playing.
I bought a Russian cue off eBay many years ago hoping it's extra weight would improve my break, but it was so damn heavy I couldn't propel it fast enough.
That has tighter pockets than American (or English) pool, although not as tight as these Russian ones. It adds significant difficulty with the structure of play with the coloured balls.
Tangentially, billiards is a great game to play after a few hours in front of a screen, as your eyes focus on the balls and holes at different distances.
If I ever start my own company I will outright ban ping pong, but a pool table would be a must in my office. It's an amazing game to take a break with, I find the noise relaxing, and people can have a full conversation while playing.
There's a line in there that I find a bit jarring and difficult to parse. I understand that this was written in 1975 (Not long before I was born, but nonetheless an era that I can't really say I understand), but when the author mentions this:
> The waitress told us he drew sketches of the faculty he did not care to eat with. She said they all had long noses.
...it sets off strange alarm bells, but I don't quite have the cultural context to figure out how I should interpret it. Of course, everyone knows that long noses are a Jewish stereotype, and that in the 70s when this article was written, anti-semitism was far enough out of fashion that it would have been impolite to express it in more than an oblique way. Can someone explain to me what MacLean was trying to say here? I know Michelson himself was of Jewish descent, which makes the comment all the more confusing.
At the time he was writing about (pre-WWII), many people of Jewish descent who by looks and/or surname could "pass" as non-Jewish, did so to avoid anti-semitism. Many of them even practiced a degree of anti-semitism themselves. MacLean is suggesting that Michelson (who didn't identify as Jewish despite his heritage) was such a person.
"Cue your ball in the center as often as you can. Don’t use something hard to control unless you have to." [edit: referring to too much english on the ball]
this was a nice life lesson for me, learned while playing 3-cushion in college. the KISS principle was something i'd heard of before, but sometimes only experience can knock sense into you.
"I saw him run over forty several times, and it was not unusual for him to put a string together of twenty or thirty"
I wonder if thats 40 caroms in cowboy? or 5 racks of 8 ball?
The caption mentions (and shows) cowboy pool: you play with 1, 3, 5 and can score with carom, bouncing the cue off 2 other balls, pocketing also scores the number on the ball till 90; till 100 only caroms score. to get 101 and win, you must scratch off the 1. Fun game, my favorite when not paying for each rack.
The description of play in the article corresponds most closely to (straight) carom billiards rather than a variety of pool (or even three-cushion billiards). A run of forty is creditable; runs of 100 or more aren't uncommon among good players. There's a billiard table just behind the foreground pool table in the photo of the Quadrangle Club.
“... Michelson would run ten or twelve billiards with a touch so delicate that the three balls could always be covered by a hat.”
Michelson was playing billiards on a table without pockets.
I agree that Michelson wasn’t playing 3-cushion because not even Willie Hoppe (best player of that era) had runs 10 or 12 on a daily basis.
Balkline was still popular as an amateur game in the 1920s, so Michelson could have been playing one of the balkline variants rather than straight rail.
To "carom" a ball, in America, is to hit the cue ball into ball X, and then after that collision, the cue ball goes on to hit ball Y. In Britain this is known as a "cannon", as in you cannon the cue ball off of X into Y.
In the game of cowboy, which is sort of a novelty game that is intentionally quirky, you can score points merely by making a carom.
I remember I once saw a single panel cartoon of two people playing billiards and the caption read, "Actually, it is rocket science!" but I've never been able to find it again.
If anybody needs translation:
In bridge you bid how many tricks you will take; there are 13 tricks and the minimum bid is 7 (i.e. you will take over half). If you make at least as many as you bid, your score is positive, if you make fewer than you bid your score is negative. You get bonus points for bidding at a certain level; "game" is 9-11 tricks depending on the situation (10 tricks is the most common for reasons I won't get into here). "small slam" (or little slam in this article) is 12 tricks and "grand slam" is 13 tricks.
You have two opponents in bridge and a finesse is a play that depends on cards being in the correct opponents hand. Most common is which opponent holds a king when you have an ace and a queen. If you can force them to decide to play the king or not before you play, then you beat the king with an ace, or beat the lower card they play with the queen. A "long finesse" (called a "deep finesse" today) requires more than one card to be in the correct position, so attempting one is a move of last resort.
Now the translation. He bid to make 9 or 10 tricks, but saw that he could make 12 tricks if all of the cards were in the position maximally lucky for him. Since he did not bid high enough to get the bonus for winning those, the reward is tiny, and he should just make the obvious plays to cover his bid. Instead he took the risky play and ended up not even making the 9 or 10 that he bid. This is the sort of mistake that even an intermediate bridge player learns not to make very quickly, but a beginner couldn't make this mistake at all because they wouldn't see the opportunity. So Michelson is smart but a terrible bridge player.
I'm struggling to think of an equivalently bad play in poker; maybe staying in the pot when your hand is the low-pair after the flop and several others have already called?