A Slave to Variance

At least I have a (only occasionally updated, but not on MySpace) blog.

[kudos to rmd for grabbing this pic during Phil Gordon’s talk at the BARGE banquet.]

I’m back from BARGE, so it’s time for me to fill in a few of the blanks.

So, my last post was a bit cryptic, but the first response is the exact response. Under typical conditions, there is usually a cost to acquire information. In poker, betting patterns are one of the primary conduits of information. The more actions in a typical betting pattern, the more information. For example, a check-raise always carries more information than a check. The crux of the information problem is that when the price of the information is too great you should generally eschew paying for it. This is a bit of inversion of the “Why raise?” question posed by others. Often times you’ll hear players saying that they are raising for information, or raising to “find out where they are at.” In general, most players take this tack far too often.

Both Daniel and David brought this up.

This isn’t so much as a result, or some novel theory. It’s more a recasting of action motivation. Aggression is good because it allows you to get money into the pot, especially if you have the best hand. Passivity is good because it allows you to be less confident about the strength of your opponents hand, and thus promote the relative strength of your own hand.

Of course, the difficulty comes in determining when you should switch from betting to calling. In limit poker, this turns out to be fairly easy to solve for most heads up confrontations.

I’ve been doing all sorts of vacation type activities for a while now, and won’t be back to “work” till the end of August.

For those of you who want something interesting to think about, here is a concept which might seem paradoxical.

Poker is a game of information, usually the more information you have the better. But there are a lot of situations where you are given a choice about how much information you’d like, and it is often better to choose less information. What are some of those situations? What does that suggest about in game tactics?