The game is dominated by all-in processes; x(t) >> b(t)

[shipitfish]

I only had time to skim this academic letter by Clément Sire entitled Universal Statistical Properties of Poker Tournaments. He primarily argues various types of observed natural phenomena in Physics and Biology evolve the same was as poker tournaments, particularly those where chips are not evenly distributed.

He does seem to make some indication that various “Kill Phil” strategies (i.e., tending to go all-in on the first betting round) have certain advantages in tournaments. However, I feel that he tends to ignore the evolution of hand play and the importance of opponents folding in certain situations. He does argue that individual hand outcomes are not particularly important in tournament play, but I am not particularly swayed by his arguments. I didn't follow every last piece of his math.

BTW, it's worlds colliding for me again: one of my undergraduate professors sent me a link to this academic article formatted in LaTeX (a free software document formatting system) about poker. I wonder how many people in the poker world have enough background knowledge to comment usefully on this article. I am sort of useless in disputing his arguments, since my math modeling and analysis skills have faded so much since my undergraduate days (and I didn't do any in graduate school, really, focusing more on Theory of Computation and other symbolic math).

Oh, and I do like how they call poker tournaments a “futile activity”. I rather like the sound of that. It reminds me that things you do only to make money are ultimately futile, and I think that's how anyone who does not love poker more than most other of life's endeavors will eventually feel about poker.

Comments

[patty-bush.livejournal.com]

Is LaTeX like Adobe and '.pdf's?

Tex and More

[(Anonymous)]

On the link you give, the paper can be downloaded in the pdf format.

In addition, the author summarizes the main results of the paper in a non technical notice:

http://www.lpt.ups-tlse.fr/article.php3?id_article=239

(click on "Read the non technical introductory news article (in English)")

Cheers

attitude change

[(Anonymous)]

I've read your blogs for a couple years now and I am curious - was there some major event in your life that caused your recent attitude change toward poker? Was it the downfall of online poker? Your blogs now seem so negative towards the game - and poker is just a game. I enjoy it myself as much as a game like chess, but poker pays me on top of the entertainment it offers. I actually quit online poker a long time ago after taking numerous unbelievable bad beat after bad beat leading me to believed online poker could in fact be fixed, not to mention I've actually caught numerous people colluding at tables I've played at. I enjoy live play much more for many reasons, tournaments and ring games.