Decision Making: Unsolvable Decisions in Poker (Crosspost)

[AntonSirius]

Just to follow up on Aaron's excellent post... for me, 'ratios' are just a way of making sure I don't fall into unconscious habits. If I've decided to raise 60%, call 20% and fold 20% with a specific hand preflop, that doesn't mean every five times I get that hand I'm going to call once and drop it once. It just reminds me to mix up my play, skewed towards raising.

Using 'crowd response' to determine those ratios seems neither a good nor a bad idea to me, in that light, just an unnecessary complication. I doubt your 'crowd' of post responses would be big enough to qualify as a proper sample anyway, though.

[AaronBrown]

Let me give another example. A classic bit of poker advice is to run one bluff for every two times you pick up a pot without showing your hand. Of course, that doesn't mean run a bluff automatically the hand after everyone folds to you a second time, that would be suicidally predictable. But if at the end of the night you've run 20 bluffs and picked up 10 hands from folds, you probably bluff too much. If you ran 2 bluffs and picked up 40 hands without opposition, you probably bluff too little.

I think this is a pretty useful rule of thumb, although it does depend on the game and the other players. It doesn't tell you when to bluff, just about how often. Notice, however, that it uses the opinion of the crowd as a contrarian indicator (as we say in finance). If you get called a lot because people think you bluff, you don't bluff. If people fold a lot, because they think you don't bluff, you bluff.

I completely agree that there is seldom a clearcut right answer in poker, but I also maintain that randomness is seldom the right play either. Good poker exists in the unpredictable, chaotic zone between computation and randomness. Gamblers like randomness, and pretend it has meaning. Straight-and-narrow types like to pretend there is no randomness, and no unpredictability. Only poker players embrace the real world, where calculation is essential, but never certain.