Playing Poker, Ben Mezrich, and The Betting Research Unit
Because some times a good title is hard to come by ;-)
Going All-In?
YOU GET TO PLAY POKER If you’re a football supporter you get to watch your heroes and maybe wear one of their signed shirts while standing in the cold rain appreciating the skills they unload on the pitch. Fair enough. The thing about gambling is you “get to play”. Doesn’t matter who you are, how old you are or what sex you are. You get to PLAY! The level of your involvement is up to you but you don’t have to be a spectator. If playing online a few nights a week and maybe taking a holiday break to Vegas gives you all the involvement you want, that’s just fine. You’re inter-acting with your pastime. However, some of us find the whole thing rather more engaging. If you want to get a feel for what I’m driving at read Ben Mezrich’s new book “Breaking Vegas”. This is an account of a remarkable group of students winning millions in a real life cat and mouse game with the big Vegas casinos. Card sharping never had more edge. If you like a good thriller, you’ll love it and it’ll make you so glad you spend more time playing online than you do on 'The Strip'. As a bonus, it’s informative and useful as was Mezrich’s previous best seller “Bringing Down the House”.
POKER’S PROFESSOR IN THE U.K. Professor Leighton Vaughan Williams is a distinguished figure by any standards. As Director of the Betting Research Unit at Nottingham Business School, Trent University and as a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society he knows a thing or two about the odds when it comes to poker hands. Holding pocket rockets (a pair of Aces) he recounts a recent online cash game with large blinds during which he raised and was re-raised with an all-in. When the cards were shown he was holding an Ace of hearts and an Ace of diamonds opposing an Ace of clubs and an Ace of spades. This was looking like a clear case of an eventual split pot. Four clubs appearing on the board quickly dismantled that victorious thought. Statistically, what were the odds of him losing with his pair of aces against another pair of aces by way of a club flush? Fairly extreme, but his conclusion and advice following this recent incident is valuable to any poker player. In a nutshell his assessment is that most gamblers assume that if a seemingly wildly unlikely event has just occurred, like the loss he has just recounted, or an extra-ordinary win with a Royal Flush, it is unlikely to happen again for a long while. The laws of probability to do not go along with our assumptions. Apparently losing against the odds is no protection against the same situation repeating itself the next time you hold pocket rockets. What he does say, which is the lesson to learn, is that an astute, solid poker player who is neither thrown on “tilt” by an against-the-odds defeat nor driven into a mega-betting frenzy by what a player takes to be a so-called “winning streak”, holds a significant advantage over others.
