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#1
09-10-2005, 06:51 PM
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astroglide\'s three questions for david sklansky
TO OOT: i apologize for my delay in asking these questions. i've been very busy lately, but i should have found the time. the most-sought question is included. i asked for advice regarding what might be other good questions, but the results weren't very good. one question i have obviously asked "for myself" but the response may be generally interesting. the other question relates to a poker problem, so many might find it interesting as well (especially if they missed it the first time around). thanks a lot for your votes on the contest, and i hope you like the questions.
TO DAVID: the personal question is the one which holds the most meaning for me. it's also rather epic in size. a well-considered answer to that one, though, would really mean the most to me regardless of what the answer actually is. i know that good answers to these questions will take some time to produce. thanks for the opportunity to ask these questions, it's a truly unique thing for 2+2 and the "anonymous poker community" in general. i'll be eternally grateful if you put a fair amount of thought into them and respond verbosely, and i'm sure many other readers will enjoy it. please don't respond to the thread until david's answers are given, and that a moderator lock the thread so that it contains just this post and is immediately followed by david's response. once he responds, i'll be happy to have open communication. i'd prefer another thread be used if people want to discuss the questions themselves before he answers just so this one 'stays clean' ------- i have what most working people would consider to be a great job. i get paid well, my office is extremely casual, and my workload is usually low. when it is high, my work is often very interesting and involves solving unique problems. i'm a 27 year-old network administrator, and i have been in the IT field for several years now. i am still able to incrementally advance in my field, but in order to get to the highest pay brackets in the field (as another company's employee) i would need to do things which are undesirable for me. these include travel, more focus on telecommunications/infrastructure (which i find boring), working for stiff companies, etc. the reward is not equal to the cost for me in order to advance in that way, so it is extremely unlikely to occur. i could already live comfortably if i maintained my current salary, inflation-adjusted, for the rest of my life. that's not a plan of mine, but it does seem to be my worst-case scenario, which really isn't that bad. i'm simply not interested in starting a business in this sector. i make more money per year playing online poker multitabling mid-limit games up to 30/60 than i do at my job, despite the fact that i max out at 60 hours per month of poker (and i already play many less hours per month than i did last year). if online poker were perfectly and clearly legal, i would give deep consideration to doing it exclusively while considering what else i could do in my future. as it stands, the combination of liking my job and not having to deal with exclusive gambling income on my taxes makes the decision to go pro much less appealing. if i were to lose my job for any reason and couldn't find another one i liked reasonably well, i would end up playing poker by default instead of taking a "job job". gaming is a big hobby of mine. i enjoy video games, although less than i did in the past, but i'm still very excited about handheld gaming platforums. much bigger than video games is my interest in "advanced" board and card games. primarily german games, which are translated to english. unlike typical american games they have less emphasis on luck. streamlined rules, many decisions, multiple paths to victory, less kingmaking/runaway leader problems, etc. they're games that have lots of fun, and reward thinking. i've always had a great interest in the results of programming software, but i've never managed to motivate myself to do the actual work involved. if i were to win 10 million dollars, i would likely attend college (i went straight to my career after high school) and begin programming for fun. all sorts of areas interest me. i have a unique perspective on tools which could be used for IT professionals, because i actually am one. i have a financial interest in advancing poker analysis tools. of particular note, i would love to try doing ports of the best eurogames to handheld gaming platforms in order to see if they could take off. off the top of my head, porting eurogames to the nintendo ds (a wireless handheld gaming system with a touchscreen) would be one of the most rewarding things i could think of. i would be very pleased to simply break even doing it on the side. i have a lot of disposable income, and i really don't spend much money. i'm happy with cable and an internet connection. the only thing on which i spend liberally would be dining, but i've been trying to lose a few pounds lately so that's not even happening. it doesn't make a noticable difference in my bank account either, though. i've got a number of contacts in property development/management, know a number of wealthy people with whom i could consult, and have what i consider to be some very low-risk and inexpensive opportunities to enter the restaurant business via local franchising. if i were to make a guess as to what i may end up doing 10 years from now, that would probably be it. i play poker for money, but i would much rather play it for fun. i'm not particularly interested in my IT career despite my success in it, and it always seems unlikely that i'll get the motivation to start programming. i don't have much risk aversion. i wouldn't like to take on loans just because i dislike the idea of it, but i'd be happy to self-finance whatever it is i try to do and make a living at it. for now i draw my good salary, i make a fairly substantial amount of money per year playing poker, and i don't spend much. i recently purchased and fully renovated a condo. i still have a mortgage on that. despite my low interest rate, i may want to pay it off just to be 100% debt-free. i have learned a ton about remodeling homes through this and picked up a lot of good contacts, so doing something related to that in real estate seems like a plausible thing to try very part-time but i have doubts about it being a racket in which i'd like to stay. so anyway, my money gets socked away in index funds on the stock market in the hopes of developing a real "interest engine" by some point in the future. i'm sure if i keep it up an online poker stays good and not decidedly illegal for at least a couple more years, i'm sure if i just kept doing what i'm doing i'd retire fairly comfortably and early, at which point maybe i'd pursue my main interests or perhaps have and be extremely interested in my own family. knowing what you now know of me, what do you think you would do if you were me in order to reasonably maximize current and future financial success and happiness? the deeper the response here the better! while poker is the most successful aspect of my life, i have little passion for online poker. casino or not, i don't really want to make poker my life career. ------- some time ago in the mid-limit forum you posed a question about the relative value of pocket fours and pocket sevens. the url for the question thread is http://tinyurl.com/cgo2k . your position was that they were almost equal. i disagreed, and ended up providing fairly detailed reasoning with simulations in another thread at http://tinyurl.com/dzybd . you posted another question at the same time at http://tinyurl.com/b7pvx which has a little more insight into the situation. i suspect you generally recall these situations, the only thing i'd really like you to look at would be the second url i provided with the sim responses at your request. you didn't respond any further to it. do you believe that i was more correct about the ev difference between the 2 hands in the situation you specified? if not, please specify why. ------- SCENARIO: FIVE YEAR-OLD KIDS. You are in an enclosed area, roughly the size of a basketball court. There are no foreign objects. - You are not allowed to touch a wall. - When you are knocked unconscious, you lose. When they are all knocked unconscious, they lose. Once a kid is knocked unconscious, that kid is "out." - I (or someone else intent on seeing to it you fail) get to choose the kids from a pool that is twice the size of your magic number. The pool will be 50/50 in terms of gender and will have no discernable abnormalities in terms of demographics, other than they are all healthy Americans. - The kids receive one day of training from hand-to-hand combat experts who will train them specifically to team up to take down one adult. You will receive one hour of "counter-tactics" training. - There is no protective padding for any combatant other than the standard-issue cup. * The kids are motivated enough to not get scared, regardless of the bloodshed. Even the very last one will give it his/her best to take you down. how many do you think you could defeat? please include your reasoning - try to type out your thought process as it occurs instead of doing it all in your head. this is probably the most popular topic in the other other topics forum history, and many many people are no doubt interested in your intelligent and reasoned analysis of it. 
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#2
09-15-2005, 09:23 PM
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Re: astroglide\'s three questions for david sklansky
1. It is not clear to me from your question whether you have a girlfriend or wife and kids. That could make a big differene in the right answer for you.
Basically I believe someone's goal should be to maximize their total happiness units over the sum total of their life. But it is not strict addition. Using money makes the point clearer. Because even disegarding inflation, having a million for twenty years, and two million for the next twenty, is not as good good as 1.5 million all the way through. Because you might die and because you can probably enjoy it more than when you are younger. But you should not take this concept too far. Twenty years with a million followed by twenty with ten million is probably better. On the other hand again though, is marginal utility concepts. Whether talking about money or happiness units, giant amounts are not appreciated proportionally and this should be taken into account. Personally if I am in a happy personal relationship, my need to achieve in other ways goes down. Put another way, mild boredom no longer bothers me. This is even more true if there are kids around. If you haven't experienced this or if you don't want to, you should plan your life based on your expectations in this matter. Sorry I can't be more specific. If you want to give me more details about your personal life I'll revist the question. 2. The two fours post was merely an example of an occasional mistake I make when illustrating an important principle. The principle is always right but I sometimes go a little too far when choosing an example. Reason being that I want my example to be as surprising as possible to give it as big an impact in people's minds as I can. I could choose obvious examples that are never wrong but they have less of an impact. So I push the envelope. Although there are times I might disagree with the right play that online results seem to recommend (because I play better than the average player), I'm sure that the fours vs sevens is not an example of this. 3. Are you talking specifically about me? Because I happen to be surprisngly strong. Meanwhile I believe the question is extremely variable base on the strength of the adult and the tactics of the five year old. And I think the answer is MUCH different for seven year olds. Certainly the right tactic would be for the kids to rush the adult en masse, knock him down and then pile up on him. Otherwise he could knock each one out individually with one punch. I believe a heavyweht wrestler could withstand the weight of kids on top of him long enough to snap a neck every three seconds and could thus beat even a sardine packed court. If neck snapping (purposeful killing) was not allowed it might be different. If killing is allowed, do the other kids get to climb on top of the dead bodies? That would be bad for me. Anyway because of my stength and the size of five year olds bodies and necks I believe I could easily handle thirty. If there were fifty they would probably be favorites IF they were trained perfectly. The average guy my age though would lose to twenty.
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#5
09-15-2005, 09:30 PM
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Re: astroglide\'s three questions for david sklansky
[ QUOTE ]
Basically I believe someone's goal should be to maximize their total happiness units over the sum total of their life. [/ QUOTE ] [ QUOTE ] And I think the answer is MUCH different for seven year olds. [/ QUOTE ] this is pure gold, great questions and great answers.
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#7
09-15-2005, 09:49 PM
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Re: astroglide\'s three questions for david sklansky
[ QUOTE ]
SCENARIO: FIVE YEAR-OLD KIDS. You are in an enclosed area, roughly the size of a basketball court. There are no foreign objects. - You are not allowed to touch a wall. - When you are knocked unconscious, you lose. When they are all knocked unconscious, they lose. Once a kid is knocked unconscious, that kid is "out." - I (or someone else intent on seeing to it you fail) get to choose the kids from a pool that is twice the size of your magic number. The pool will be 50/50 in terms of gender and will have no discernable abnormalities in terms of demographics, other than they are all healthy Americans. - The kids receive one day of training from hand-to-hand combat experts who will train them specifically to team up to take down one adult. You will receive one hour of "counter-tactics" training. - There is no protective padding for any combatant other than the standard-issue cup. * The kids are motivated enough to not get scared, regardless of the bloodshed. Even the very last one will give it his/her best to take you down. [/ QUOTE ] The way I think of it is this: clones of me trying to take out a Goliath. Given that we are all suicidal (don't care about being injured or killed) and no holds barred "rules", the correct way to take Goliath down is to surround him and slowly approach him until about 5-10 feet away, at which point he'd make an attempt to counter-attack. While he's fending off 3-5 of us, the rest bumrush his knees and bite him, Mike Tyson style. Sklansky wouldn't even be able to take out 10 of them.
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#10
09-16-2005, 01:46 AM
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Re: astroglide\'s three questions for david sklansky
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ] this is pure gold, great questions and great answers. [/ QUOTE ] wow. that exchange was perfect. [/ QUOTE ] agreed - thank you david
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