The "Emperor's nose" fallacy & poker

[El_Hombre_Grande]

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After all, this became a very useful thread. This is despite (no, indeed because of) Splawn Darts' inability to provide any explanation whatsoever for the gibberish he posted when repeatedly asked for an alternative to typical hand range analysis.

Let me make sure I am clear: it is not that I fault him for being wrong, or not having another "insightful" legend to make some sort of a semblance of a useful statement. I have been wrong before, and will be again. It's instead that he is pretending that there is some deep, hidden meaning to all this when there's clearly not, and in the process of doing so, has made it crystal clear (to me at least)that the point of the original post (and one can only assume, perhaps some of his other posts) is simply to engage in semantic BS. Which is, of course, useless. But it is indeed entirely useful to know his modus operandi, lest I spent another minute of my life pondering these deep, dark psuedo-mysteries. Do You See Why?

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There's plenty of deep meaning here. If you don't want to "waste" your time on it, that's OK though.

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I CALL. I'll waste more time. Please, master, tell me the "deep meaning" of the long nose Chinese emperor? I thirst for your knowledge. I, too, want to play with Dan Harrington and be a millionaire. Can the story of the long nosed emperor help me, oh wise one?

[Gonso]

This whole thread is a waste of time. OP has been repeatedly shown to be a blowhard and BS artist w/ no credibility whatsoever.

For the sake of contributing something, the first problem was the analogy in the first place. In poker, you can create a range (however accurate or inaccurate) based on the information available. This is different than basing a decision based on bad/useless data.

OP will not See Why, or at least pretend not to.

[jtr]

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The way you described it, B).


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OK, congratulations. It wasn't a trick question; obviously the answer is B. The point is rather to get you to think about why we're OK to average over the three expected values in concluding that B is the better option.


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However, your situation B) is not analogous to anything that occurs in poker except for a blind all-in. Do you see why?

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If you really consider this a fair and constructive response to my post, then I'm afraid our conversation is over.

[Sean Fraley]

I feel almost bad about answering positively to this post earlier in the thread. Also, after looking at my response today, and a response I made in a thread in uNL, I need to post something to clarify my response.

I normally post in the uNL forum, and have on occasion seen responses to hand posts where the OP was told that he should make what I consider questionable calls on later streets because Hero is ahead of a range of hands that they believe villain would see a flop with and the respondent seems to assume that it is necessary to include these in the range at the time to make a decision. This kind of thinking on the part of otherwise good players is why skilled LAGs clean up at NL tables.

I agree with SplawnDarts statement that making range calculations with too wide of a range is useless, and can quite often loose money long term. On the other hand if you get to a point in the course of a hand where villain's play up to that point can represent multiple hands, you have no choice but to make a calculated decision based on the range. The key is to narrow the range down as much as reasonably possible to make the calculation as margin of error as low as possible.

I also agree with PhantomGoose's point that telling us how flawed range calculations are is pretty useless if you don't offer up some relatively concrete alternative to use instead. It seldom takes a great mind to point out problems in the world, it normally does take one to come up with solutions.

[illegit]

The first post in this thread makes no sense.

A) The analogy to the emperor's nose is flawed because when we estimate hand ranges we are not using other people's incorrect opinions, we are using our own knowledge of the player and his tendencies to determine a range. Thus the data that goes in is solid, and the average estimated length of the Emperor's Nose will in fact match that of the actual nose within a certain degree of certainty. And if it doesn't then this denotes a flaw in your ability to estimate hand ranges, NOT in the process (as someone else said, very correctly). If the process was flawed that would mean that no matter how solid the data we put in, we will always get an undesired result which is not the case, in either estimating the emperor's nose or estimating hand ranges. In both, if the data in is solid, the results are solid. Always. Without exception.

B) To claim that this process only 'works' when the actual hand of villain is in the middle of our estimated range is absolutely incorrect. The times that villain's hand is one that falls in the stronger part of his range are made up for by the times his hand is in the weaker part of his range, and in any one circumstance the hand need not fall in the middle of the range. If villain's hand is always falling in the stronger part of the range in a particular situation, more often than you had weighted that strong part of the range, then your reading and range estiamtion needs adjusted accordingly.

[El_Hombre_Grande]

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It seldom takes a great mind to point out problems in the world, it normally does take one to come up with solutions.

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Point Set Match. My objection to this BS is the lack of an alternative approach, other then to pretend to be all-knowing and refuse to answer the bare minimum question of what do we replace this supposedly fallacious paradigm with?Without any reasonable alternative to the inexact art of hand reading / analysis of what equity we have in relationship to those hands that based on the best info we have the villian could actually hold, the story is useless.

[JaredL]

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The first post in this thread makes no sense.

A) The analogy to the emperor's nose is flawed because when we estimate hand ranges we are not using other people's incorrect opinions, we are using our own knowledge of the player and his tendencies to determine a range. Thus the data that goes in is solid, and the average estimated length of the Emperor's Nose will in fact match that of the actual nose within a certain degree of certainty. And if it doesn't then this denotes a flaw in your ability to estimate hand ranges, NOT in the process (as someone else said, very correctly). If the process was flawed that would mean that no matter how solid the data we put in, we will always get an undesired result which is not the case, in either estimating the emperor's nose or estimating hand ranges. In both, if the data in is solid, the results are solid. Always. Without exception.

B) To claim that this process only 'works' when the actual hand of villain is in the middle of our estimated range is absolutely incorrect. The times that villain's hand is one that falls in the stronger part of his range are made up for by the times his hand is in the weaker part of his range, and in any one circumstance the hand need not fall in the middle of the range. If villain's hand is always falling in the stronger part of the range in a particular situation, more often than you had weighted that strong part of the range, then your reading and range estiamtion needs adjusted accordingly.

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This is essentially what I was going to post.

[indianaV8]

> OP has been repeatedly shown to be a blowhard and
> BS artist w/ no credibility whatsoever.

I don't agree here ;-) From my past experience OP sometimes argue to details beyond any reasonable point, but has some vg posts.

Fast look into the thread I got the following points
1) Don't make a lot of math based on useless data - obvious, but I still like the original story, doesn't improve my BB/100H but it's good.
2) When looking at data do the math right - it's not always an average you should take over the hand range. Also fairly obvious but I hardly have seen ever this considered in most of hand analysys I've read

And actually there is no point for discussion. The more reliable data you have estimating the exact probability that he has each possible hand + how he would react to your actions - the better you can do the math and play. If you don't have data, you're just gambling, or playing (what you hope to approximate of course) universal optimal / or exploitive vs. average field stategy.

It's just a good story.

[El_Hombre_Grande]

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And actually there is no point for discussion. The more reliable data you have estimating the exact probability that he has each possible hand + how he would react to your actions - the better you can do the math and play.

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NO. You've missed the entire point. He is(or was) claiming that the process itself is flawed. In other words, it doesn't matter what info you put in, the methodology is like a calculator that thinks 2+2=5. You get a bad result with good information, and that's simply not so.

[7n7]

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OK, you can feel free to believe I'm a liar.

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Thanks, but you've more than earned it. Don't sweat it though, before too long 2+2 will get to know you the way we do over at Harmony.

I doubt you're even a winning player, certainly your 8bb claim from the recent thread (where you backed down off a challenge when confronted, remember that?) demonstrates that.

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Trust me Phantom, some of us know, some of us indeed know. Splawn has been spouting his crap in multiple forums w/little to nothing to back anything up with it. If you take him to task, he just goes into the same babble about how he's indisputably correct.

I admit, at first I was a little drawn in b/c he sounds intelligent enough...and then I did some research and sought out some of his strategy advice. Check out the O8 forum for an example of absolute rubbish. The thread was cited in the first reply to his post here.

For all of you other readers of Splawn's advice, seriously, do yourself a favor and do some research. His arrogance blinds him to the point that it prevents him from seeing any other point of view, regardless of it's accuracy.