The "Emperor's nose" fallacy & poker

[PhantomGoose]

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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.

[SplawnDarts]

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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) demonstrates that.

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You may have missed it, but I negotiated a prop bet with DuBot and now he's been very scarce to avoid firming up the details. I suspect he'll bail out.

[HowdyC]

Casual lurker, first-time poster here. Just wanted to say, I was enjoying this thread quite a bit. Then it turned into this petty fight about nothing. Lame. I'm looking to improve my thought process at the table and there was some good discsussion going on I thought.

[PhantomGoose]

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Casual lurker, first-time poster here. Just wanted to say, I was enjoying this thread quite a bit. Then it turned into this petty fight about nothing. Lame. I'm looking to improve my thought process at the table and there was some good discsussion going on I thought.

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There are a lot of good resources on 2+2, however there are some here who are not qualified to give advice. It's one thing to lie and boast all of the time... that is pretty harmless in itself. It's another thing to masquerade as something you're not and consistently be contrary to other posters with all kinds of nonsense, some of whom have vastly more experience and understanding of the game.

Sorry the thread was spoiled for you, that is if you're not actually Splawndarts himself... (I don't really think you are, but he has been known to post under different names at another site I frequent). Sorry you choose this for a first post.

Here and here will kind of give you the idea of what the guy is all about.

He's quickly becoming known for the same crap here. Talks big, can't back up his (often extraordinary) claims, gets super-defensive and arrogant when told that he's wrong, even when he knows he is.

[Galwegian]

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There's absoloutly no rigorous reason to believe that the expectation for a number of hands averages to the expectation for the hand villain actually has.

So in fact there's a subtle problem with the process above and beyond any problems of execution.

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I have to object here - this statement (as far as I can work out) is meaningless. What is "the expectation for a number of hands"? What is "expectation for the hand that the villain actually has"? I respectfully suggest that you should spend some time reviewing your understanding of expectations and distributions. The "process" is not flawed. If you find yourself making bad calls because of overestimating the villains hand range, then it is likely a flaw in your hand reading skills.

[jtr]

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Averaging is only useful if the mean of the things you are averaging equals the accurate value you're trying to get. In this case, the value we're trying to get is our expectation with respect to villain's hand.

There's absoloutly no rigorous reason to believe that the expectation for a number of hands averages to the expectation for the hand villain actually has.

So in fact there's a subtle problem with the process above and beyond any problems of execution.

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This looks pretty dodgy to me. Would you care to give an answer to a simple thought experiment, just to see if we are on the same page?

Suppose you are given an opportunity to choose either

A) a guaranteed payoff of $100

or

B) a chance to choose from one of three boxes, with each box having a different amount of money inside it. Let's say the amounts are $50, $80, and $200.

In fact, if you take option B you don't actually choose the box, but it is chosen for you by someone else having randomly pre-selected one of the three boxes. Your choice is simply to take either A) the $100 payout, or B) one of the three boxes.

Presumably you see where I'm going with this. On the assumption that we are interested in maximizing our expected value, what is wrong with averaging across the payouts of the three boxes in order to figure out whether we prefer option A or option B?

You appear to have a strange take on probability if you want to insist that the only expected value that matters is the one for the opponent's actual holding. Certainly if we knew the opponent's actual holding then we'd make our calculations based on that, but your position equates to someone who insists, in my little experiment, that whether they should choose option A or B depends on which box has been pre-selected under option B. The whole point is that we do not have information that would allow us to distinguish between the $50, $80, and $200 cases for option B. Given this, the best thing we can do is to average over them.

You have built up a bit of a straw man, I think, by suggesting that many people when faced with poker decisions will do the equivalent of throwing in some more possibilities for the cash amounts in the boxes under option B. If I weirdly suppose that instead of the three equiprobable boxes as stated, there is a fourth box that has only $5, or that the box with $50 is much more likely than the others to be chosen, then certainly this will lead to me incorrectly assessing the expected value of option B. However, my error has nothing to do with the process of averaging across expected values, and everything to do with plugging in bad information at the beginning of that process.

In, summary, I can't understand when you've gone after averaging when all you really mean to criticize is poor information gathering and parameter estimation when putting people on hand ranges.

[El_Hombre_Grande]

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?

[SplawnDarts]

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Casual lurker, first-time poster here. Just wanted to say, I was enjoying this thread quite a bit. Then it turned into this petty fight about nothing. Lame. I'm looking to improve my thought process at the table and there was some good discsussion going on I thought.

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You can expect the people who've just been shown to be employing a logical fallacy to get defensive and useless like he did. It's par for the course.

[SplawnDarts]

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Averaging is only useful if the mean of the things you are averaging equals the accurate value you're trying to get. In this case, the value we're trying to get is our expectation with respect to villain's hand.

There's absoloutly no rigorous reason to believe that the expectation for a number of hands averages to the expectation for the hand villain actually has.

So in fact there's a subtle problem with the process above and beyond any problems of execution.

[/ QUOTE ]

This looks pretty dodgy to me. Would you care to give an answer to a simple thought experiment, just to see if we are on the same page?

Suppose you are given an opportunity to choose either

A) a guaranteed payoff of $100

or

B) a chance to choose from one of three boxes, with each box having a different amount of money inside it. Let's say the amounts are $50, $80, and $200.

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The way you described it, B).

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

[SplawnDarts]

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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.