Economic Research Study - Mid/High Poker players and Risk

[ianisakson]

swapping action can be good to reduce variance, but you have to be careful of the player type you swap with. obv it's bad to swap with someone who has a significant difference in roi unless you're swapping for different %'s (ie player 1 assumes a 100% roi, player 2 assumes 80% roi and they swap 5% of player 2's action for 4% of player 1's action).

some people also swap action for reasons other than variance, maybe they just want to have some added reason to root for a buddy.

[DannyOcean_]

I got some good feedback from a few people, thanks for the time. This project is only a paper that's a like 4 pages long, but my prof said I might want to look into expanding this and making it my thesis and getting it published, in which case I might be back asking for a large pool of specific data and maybe even interviews and such for the publication part. Exciting stuff, no doubt. My prof thinks it's a really good thing to look into, because this is such a perfect example of an economic phenomenon happening on its own without a 'central planner' having to do anything. I could go into the math and talk about the declining marginal utility of money and it's relation to variance and risk aversion and utility efficiency theory and stuff, but whatev.

The online poker player's community is freaking awesome in regards to economics research. Online poker is almost a perfect example of a no regulation, free market environment. dog-eat-dog behavior. There are no artificial controls or constraints anywhere, and yet these efficient outcomes are still reached. Plus, the 'winning' players are generally very math savvy, very economics oriented, and knowledgable of game theory. Add all of those things and you get a lot cool economic outcomes which don't always occur with market intrusions and governments and retarded people in the real world.

Thanks for all the help. I'll post updates and stuff if this turns into a thesis paper and gets published, which it might. If it does, i might call on the high stakes MTT'ers for some more in depth data, interviews, and so forth.

Danny

[DontRaiseMeBro]

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Online poker is almost a perfect example of a no regulation, free market environment. dog-eat-dog behavior

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Finally, in September 2006, the Congress passed legislation that makes it a crime for a bank or financial institution to transfer money to an online gambling site.

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http://www.playwinningpoker.com/online/poker/legal/

[DannyOcean_]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Online poker is almost a perfect example of a no regulation, free market environment. dog-eat-dog behavior

[/ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]
Finally, in September 2006, the Congress passed legislation that makes it a crime for a bank or financial institution to transfer money to an online gambling site.

[/ QUOTE ]
http://www.playwinningpoker.com/online/poker/legal/

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And this has stopped you from playing online how? Also, it's dubious legality is in question, it's likely to be repealed and only a handful of sites respect it in the least. Internet poker is still a very very very free market compared to everything else in the world.

More to the point of what I'm talking about in my paper, there are no big organizations of poker players (don't cite the PPA, they don't really exist) that coordinate movements. Basically you have dozens of individual business agents (sites) interacting with hundreds of thousands of consumers (players) with no unions, formal groups, contracts, etc. You have a large infrastructure of informal networks that are very 'invisible hand'-esque rather than artificially constructed groups. It's a great place to have little economic experiments if you ask me imo.