Actually, the strategy for poker is about on par with bridge, because both use the same deck and therefore have the same mathmatical odds for hitting certain cards. The only difference with poker, other than the rules, is that there is a tremendous amount of psychology that has nothing to do with the cards.
I can play a game with beginners, and actually win, or break even without looking at my cards, just by bullying them with my betting. I've done it. It's a good exercise for people who are trying to develop their game. Plus, with poker, greed, fear, survival insitnct and competition come into play. Also, you can train your opponents to react to you a certain way, and then trap them. You can also create a false table image of yourself and take advantage of it, etc.
Strategy wise, it is mostly based on an emotional level in the advanced games. Having a great memory helps too. People tend to play certain types of hands, and play them the same way every time. Knowing this tells you when you can bluff, and when you are being bluffed. The probability is fundamental, and every intermediate player knows it. However, the real skill is the people skill, knowing how to apply maximum pressure to protect your mediocre hand, or suck someone in to a trap.
Poker is the Bridge of today. The difference is that Poker is a multibillion dollar industry, while Bridge is becoming a lost pastime, although I wouldn't be surprised if it made a comeback.
Brent
Mathematical game theory is actually most relevant when playing against experts. Predicting and influencing what an opponent will do based on psychology amounts to taking advantage of weaknesses of the other players. A strong player can't be taken advantage of in that way, so if you want to succeed against top players, you will need to become skilled at mathematically precise play.
A simple example of mathematically precise strategy is the scissors-paper-stone game. The optimum strategy is to choose each possibility with equal probability. If you're playing the game against a poor player, then you will often be able to guess what your opponent will do and take advantage of it. Against a good player, you won't be able to guess, so the random strategy is the best.
The weakness of poker computer programs is that they don't take maximal advantage of poor players. Against expert players they do fairly well.
Hi Steve,
Please, for your own sake, don't start playing poker for money.
Of course, I wouldn't play for real money without learning the game first, but I don't feel motivated to invest a lot of time in learning the game, at least not at this time.
You could learn how to play mathmatically precise in about a day.
You must not have read the description, in the second link that I posted, of what mathematically precise play actually is, nor understood the analogy of the scissors-paper-stone game. By precise, I don't mean doing the same thing every time you get a certain hand. Precise means taking into account the whole history of events during the process of playing the game, and using specific probabilities based on that info to decide randomly what you should do.
Here is a quote from the second link:
It is impossible to compute the complete game-theoretic solution for Texas Hold'em (the poker variant used to determine the World Champion), because the 2-player game has more than a quintillion states (ie. 10 to the 18th power, or a billion billion). We used abstraction techniques to create smaller games that have about 30 million states, but retain most of the key properties of the real game. The solutions to these smaller games produce an approximation of the game-theoretic optimal solution for the real game.
This is obviously not something that anyone could ever completely learn, let alone in one day.
Deception is a much greater part of the game than math. You must use the math, you must understand the odds, but you must also play your opponent. If they can see your cards, you can never win! And by playing mathmatically precise, it's almost the same as if you show them your cards.
The scissors-paper-stone game is an illustration that shows how the mathematically precise randomness evades revealing your cards. The randomness is unpredictable, so the opponent won't know for sure what your actions mean.
So, if you want to succed against beginners and recreational players, math is important. If you want to succeed against experts, a whole lot more is involved.
You yourself already said that beginners are more vulnerable to psychological tricks, and that you don't need math to win against beginners. Any success with using psychology against experts is simply revealing their weaknesses. Of course, you can argue that some weakness will always be there. It is also difficult to choose randomly without some kind of randomizing device. I wonder what other poker players would think, if an opponent used dice to decide what to do. Would they be annoyed?
Dan, your observation about the car dealer is right on, and by playing along you were able to catch him in a lie, which gives you vital information about his ethics and motivation. That's poker.
Brent
The car dealer obviously wasn't a good poker player, since he fell for that. My grandfather was a car dealer, and then in later years went into selling Airstream trailers and mobile homes. He was an expert salesman. I remember him saying that it is foolish to lie to the customer about what you're selling.
Here's an interesting curiosity.
RoShamBo (rock-paper-scissors) Programming Competition:
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~darse/rsbpc.htmlOr how about a strategy guide from the World RPS Society:
http://www.worldrps.com/advanced.htmlIn a Chinese lesson book, I read that this game is popular in China, as well as variants involving different numbers of fingers. A typical way they play the game is that the loser of each round has to drink some wine.
Sometimes the University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group hosts a challenge to test their poker playing algorithms. You can prove your skill against their computer logic.
http://games.cs.ualberta.ca/webgames/poker/Contests/contest.html
