An alternative formulation of Schoonmaker

[TomCowley]

It seems like a lot of Schoonmaker's points about winners and losers can be explained more succintly by:

A successful player hates to lose a little more than he likes to win.

Anybody who has this inverted can be happy being a long-term loser as long as he's winning often enough. The player has no drive to improve because the activity is already +personal happiness, and he will knowingly make -EV +PH bets (chasing without odds, mostly).

Anybody who hates to lose too much vs. enjoying winning will be too risk-averse or unstable to succeed at poker, since the game is guaranteed to deliver strings of losing sessions and horrible beats. The player may tilt short-term, but will definitely quit long-term because the losses outweigh the wins (and this may even drive some slightly winning players away). If a player is weighted towards this direction, but it isn't so bad he can't play, he won't win as much because he won't be able to make "ballsy" +EV bets because of overweighting losing. Weak-Tight play fits in here.

Only a player in the proper range of hating to lose vs. loving to win can be properly self-motivated to succeed at poker (and many other things). A winner demands an edge because a 0EV bet is -personal happiness to him (assuming he has some kind of emotional investment in the outcome and isn't just betting red flop/black flop out of boredom). Only a +EV bet balances his greater hatred of losing.

[Gelford]

In an Expected Utility set up as the one formulated by Von-Neumann and Morgenstern back in 1948, it all comes down to how concave the utility function of player is, which in turn determines how riskaverse he is, if his utilityfunction is convex, then he is a degenerate gambler and blah blah blah ...


Old news basically, still waiting for the day when Dr. Al does some serious serious work based on substantual data aimed at the serious gambler, which most of the posters here are.

[TomCowley]

Bleh, and I thought I'd thought up something cool in the shower. I didn't know I'd been scooped by two guys who published just after my parents were born. /sigh

[Gelford]

Actually I is worse than that, the basic idea was first introduced in 1738 by Daniel Bernoulli, but Von N and Morgenstern where the first to make a proper mathematical formulation of it, that was acceptable to economic theory.


But no need for the sigh, It is pretty cool that you came up with it on your own [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]