Quantifying the accuracy of tells

[mvdgaag]

A system like this would be very easily expoited, because it will not be very flexible and therefore it would be easy to fake tells as soon as you get an idea of what the system will output.
I also doubt that it would be very reliable (as is human judgement), so it will only be effective in close situations.
I agree that a system like this (if performed by a human) might add to the accuracy of his tells, but only to a certain extend and so will experience and intuition. Especially if experience and intuition VS a system like this will contradict each other, I think experience will be correct more often. While if experience has no real strong tells the system might be correct more often.
It will be a nice complementation when you are A. in doubt of what to do and B. have no intuitive tells that help you.

So besides coming up with a system that a human can use in practise at a live game (which is hard) it will only add a little value in few situations and will be easy to exploit as soon as the system is known to your opponents.

[weknowhowtolive]

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By turning reads into math you will most likely be taking AWAY the edge you have against decent players.

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I guess we just throw Bayes Theorem out the window then...

Since that's based on the read of the possible hands an opponent could be holding.

b

[/ QUOTE ]But if you say, 70%, and at 69% you're folding instead of calling, you're now just guessing.

Id like for someone to give an example on how this would actually be turned into an equation and would then be reliable rather than some loose number combined with a loose guess of a players hole cards.

[David Sklansky]

The responses you are getting are karma for your cuffs posts. Want to reconsider?

[weknowhowtolive]

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The responses you are getting are karma for your cuffs posts. Want to reconsider?

[/ QUOTE ]Do you think that the OPs idea is possible?

[*TT*]

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The responses you are getting are karma for your cuffs posts. Want to reconsider?

[/ QUOTE ]Do you think that the OPs idea is possible?

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Yes. Perhaps my answer is not as defined as the OP would like it to be, but in simplistic terms that even I can understand we already apply Bayes Therm in this manner.

[weknowhowtolive]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
The responses you are getting are karma for your cuffs posts. Want to reconsider?

[/ QUOTE ]Do you think that the OPs idea is possible?

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Yes. Perhaps my answer is not as defined as the OP would like it to be, but in simplistic terms that even I can understand we already apply Bayes Therm in this manner.

[/ QUOTE ]But that doesnt seem to be what he's asking for.

[Xanthro]

It's impossible to quantify tells with accuracy, because not only do the differ between people, but within the same person and the tells constantly change.

We might pickup a tell in someone that proves to be 100% true that session, and the next session is 100% false.

[hoyasaxa]

youre trying to mix two different schools of poker. Youre mixing the new age, mathematics, statistics and game theory school with the old fashioned texas gambler "i jus don' think u got it" school. When I pick up a tell on an opponent, I dont act on it based on math. If I have a fairly strong and consistant tell that my opponent is weak, I will bet or raise regardless of my cards. And if i pick up a tell that my opponent is strong I throw everything away except a nearly unbeatable hand. Tells and reads are more about your instincts than math; try to rationalize what your gut tells you, and you'll probably just confuse yourself and make an incorrect decision more often than not.

[weknowhowtolive]

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youre trying to mix two different schools of poker. Youre mixing the new age, mathematics, statistics and game theory school with the old fashioned texas gambler "i jus don' think u got it" school. When I pick up a tell on an opponent, I dont act on it based on math. If I have a fairly strong and consistant tell that my opponent is weak, I will bet or raise regardless of my cards. And if i pick up a tell that my opponent is strong I throw everything away except a nearly unbeatable hand. Tells and reads are more about your instincts than math; try to rationalize what your gut tells you, and you'll probably just confuse yourself and make an incorrect decision more often than not.

[/ QUOTE ]Exactly.

[JaredL]

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youre trying to mix two different schools of poker. Youre mixing the new age, mathematics, statistics and game theory school with the old fashioned texas gambler "i jus don' think u got it" school. When I pick up a tell on an opponent, I dont act on it based on math. If I have a fairly strong and consistant tell that my opponent is weak, I will bet or raise regardless of my cards. And if i pick up a tell that my opponent is strong I throw everything away except a nearly unbeatable hand. Tells and reads are more about your instincts than math; try to rationalize what your gut tells you, and you'll probably just confuse yourself and make an incorrect decision more often than not.

[/ QUOTE ]Exactly.

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While it is true, I don't think it's all that relevant.

What is a tell? It's a noisy signal of the hand strength of the opponent. This is clearly possible to model.

Do I think that you can mentally come up with a model in your head and use it at the table, doing all the Bayesian updating? No.

Despite the tone of OP's responses in this thread being unacceptable (because it only hinders discussion and derails threads), his original post is actually pretty good. Responses like those above demonstrate why - this is an area of poker theory that hasn't really been touched. Caro clearly overrates the usefulness of tells, while the 2+2 guys tend to say that they aren't worth much at all (before Mason jumps in here, I will say that they do describe at various times when a tell could be useful, an example is in SSHE if I'm not mistaken). Nobody as far as I know has done any analysis on the subject. This is probably the reason behind responses claiming it can't be done. There are interesting questions such as how reliable does the tell have to be, once one defines reliability of a tell.

In approaching the question, one must consider different ways of modeling noise.

You could model it as a spread. Say you are playing [0,1] poker. With some probability one of the players gives off a tell. A tell in this case would be a random signal from some interval around your card. So say your card is a .8. In giving off the tell, it gives the other person a signal that is a random number between .78 and .82. This would do well at representing the situation where somehow you can tell broadly what type of hand your opponent has - say you can see if he likes his hand or not.

You could extend this by just giving a region. Some area is revealed, and the player has a hand somewhere in there and any hand in the region is equally likely. This would allow for situations where the vibe you're getting is that she either has a great or terrible hand.

The other obvious option is to set it up so that with probability p the player's actual hand is revealed and with probability 1-p a totally random card is revealed. This is probably the most realistic in terms of what people think of as tells. Her hands are shaking, does she have the nuts she's representing in her betting or did she just have a cup of coffee? You could also combine this with the spread - with probability p the signal is totally random, with probability 1-p it's within some range of the true value.

Finally, for the above you could allow for the possibility of the sender giving off fake tells. Maybe that could actually lead to the randomness. You could also make it not certain that she successfully gives off the tells as well.

I think solving the above games, in the three situations where the sender is unaware of giving off the tell, aware but can't help it, and not only aware but can give off fake tells somehow would be interesting.

Jared