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In a recent post on another thread Reno wrote:
All my conscious and mathematically informed life I believed what Reno believes that the trick of successful gambling is to find edges and trudge through losing streaks in search of the long run. Recently, though, I read Larry Phillips Zen and the Art of Poker which I thought was perhaps the best general book on gambling psychology I’ve ever read. Because it says all the right things with great pith, I was surprised by his presentation of the same point Reno addresses above. He suggests, contrary to those with mathematical sense, one can "Learn how to avoid a losing streak." On this point alone his advice seemed to me quite muddled:
So you can’t see a losing streak coming, but maybe you can. It would be one thing if such advice could be an read as artfully proposed paradox, but I can’t read it like that because I think hind-sight fallacies are the competent gambler’s last temptation. One needs to be cautioned against them, and this advice seems to me to encourage that vice.
The above quotation comes from the chapter "Calmness and Rhythm." The same message is reworked in the chapter on "Cyclical Luck."
A bit later Phillips insists, "how hot or cold you are is a legitimate factor in the decision-making process." Because it is evident that this author writes out of a great depth of experience and with a real power of reflection I decided that this advice, which seems absolutely wrong for a race or sports bettor, was probably sound with respect to poker. After turning it over in my mind for a long time, I realized that poker decisions concern a changing cast of opponents who one can legitimately feel one has a better or worse read on—and the value of one’s hand is obviously contingent on the quality of that read. It’s also the case that while there are nine races run each day, or twelve professional football games played each week, forty or more poker hands get dealt in an hour and the games go 24-7. So race and sports decision-makers, it seems to me, have to do everything they can to consider and engage all the events they are prepared to consider. A part of this discipline involves teaching themselves to believe that the outcome of their last decision has no bearing on their insight into the next event.
Having realized this, I was pretty pleased with myself. "My goal," I repeated to myself for the thousandth or two-thousandth time, "is to get to the point where I can make 600 bets a year with a 7 percent advantage, and to bet that advantage steadily. I’m gong to find opportunities and I’m not going to trap myself in over-refined distinctions between good, extra-good, and really good bets."
But there is a paragraph in Zen and the Art of Poker that has gotten me to start to rethink the vision that I’ve had for the last few years:
Bet more when you’re winning and less when your losing is the second oldest gambling advice there is. As I have said, for someone who has developed an orderly way to consider information and who has proven his ability to maintain the effort required by the decision-making framework he’s invented, it seems to me like bad advice. But what’s new here is the advice to "downscale the actual way you play the game." I’ve never heard that formulated before, and its effect has been to expose what is perhaps my false ideal of effort. I plan to consider the prices on about 5500 events (NBA, AL baseball plus NFL football) over a nine month period so as to pick 600 out of them that are mis-priced. This plan assumes my effort will be constant. I recognize that as a season develops I will find more plays, but I want to think that the constancy of my effort will translate into a constant value for my plays. But what if my effort simply can’t be close to constant? What if when I’m winning I do my logging with great joy and look for extra details and begin to feel in sync with the game, and when I’m losing I start to log mechanically and experience a sense of immobility while putting the games together in my head? What if I reframed Phillips’ question, "How is my luck running?" as the question, "What do my most recent results suggest about how skillfully I’ve been making borderline decisions recently?" What if there were an art of gambling one could teach oneself that did not ape the art of managing an investment portfolio? In the baseball season it might take the shape of making my first forty wagers at a five percent level, and then, if I were ahead, allowing myself to bet up to the full advantage projected by my figures. In the football season it might mean that the first three weeks of the season I would expect to find one or two plays that I would bet at a ten percent level. In weeks four and five I would expect to find three or four plays, and if any one of them looked good and I was ahead, a fifteen percent play would be allowed. After week five, if I were ahead three or more units I would look for several maximum advantage plays each week and if I continued to win and feel in tune with the season I would expect my plays warranted fifteen percent backing.
Suddenly I would be more vulnerable to all the classical traps of hopefulness and regret, but the less structured betting structure would also give me a chance to make discriminations I might in fact be capable of making. I can imagine that thirty to forty times during the baseball season I would make a fifty cent price difference that I’d be willing to stand on, and that the spreadsheet would tell me to send in fifteen percent of my bankroll. If I lost a couple of those in a week giving back a month of grindingly accumulated profits, I can imagine I’d be frustrated and gun-shy. I might find my logging turning mechanical, and in order to accommodate this symptom of the shock to my will, I might have to pull back with-in the style of my play. But I can also imagine my prices being right and my luck being good and going on little winning runs that would make my season—and I can even imagine sensing when these runs were over, knowing when to say when. Maybe I would find I could be more disciplined inside this less disciplined way of playing. Maybe I would welcome the volatility and it would be good for me. I’m still thinking about it.
Let’s go back to Reno’s 38% example which is where I was going with this whole post. Let’s say when he posts on whoremongering he’s very happy and writing well and other people are happy too and telling him what a great writer of whoremongering stories he is. So then let’s say his next three posts, points on the technical minutia of his craft, are excellent. But then let’s say some people start dissing his whoremongering posts, so he decides not to write the last one even though he was looking forward to writing it. And then let’s say his next few posts were kind of clunkers and then let’s say he really goes downhill getting into vituperative exchanges with somebody or other. What I’m wondering is if it might be possible that some of Reno’s posts make him feel good and lend their karma to his next posts making them more likely to be good, while others do the opposite. If this is true, the next time he hits a losing streak, Reno should end it by telling us his Thailand stories.
Despite losing 11 games in a row that I was heavy on earlier this baseball season, I don't believe in lucky winning streaks and unlucky losing streaks. It is all pure chance based on the cold, hard mathematical probablility of the situation In fact, carying it even a step further,studies have refuted the concept of "streaking" or "hot" players in sports. For example, if a baseball player gets 8 hits in 10 at-bats, he would be considered "hot." However, no matter what
criteria is used to define "hot"---be it 8 hits in 10 at bats or 15 hits in 20 at bats, etc.--the true probability of the player getting a hit in his subsequent at-bat
is equivalent to his long-term batting average.
I'll give you another example. According to an independent Internet monitoring agency, 38% of Reno's Bettorsworld's posts are excellent. Let's say that for some unprecedented and inexplicable reason, Reno's brain synapses are firing right on cue, and he submits 8 excellent posts in a row. Well, regardless of Reno's hot streak, the odds of his subsequent post being excellent is still 38%.
All my conscious and mathematically informed life I believed what Reno believes that the trick of successful gambling is to find edges and trudge through losing streaks in search of the long run. Recently, though, I read Larry Phillips Zen and the Art of Poker which I thought was perhaps the best general book on gambling psychology I’ve ever read. Because it says all the right things with great pith, I was surprised by his presentation of the same point Reno addresses above. He suggests, contrary to those with mathematical sense, one can "Learn how to avoid a losing streak." On this point alone his advice seemed to me quite muddled:
Is there anything you can do to avoid a losing streak? There are a few things.
First, watch for any clues that you might be getting cold. And by this I mean early clues….Don’t let losing over and over at the end of the hand be your first clue that you’re cold.
One of the difficulties with a losing streak is that it is not a losing streak until it happens. That is, you’re not really down until you’re down—and then it’s too late. Its very essence is a combination of events that takes you suddenly beyond the shore and drops you there before you can prepare for it….Sitting there a moment later, you wonder to yourself: How did it happen? How did I get so far down and not see it coming?
One answer is: You weren’t there until you were there. And then it was too late.
But there is a second problem here as well: you can’t structure your game around this sort of thing happening. To design your game too much for this would be poor play and would stunt your game. So, in a sense, you have to be unprepared for it.
Look for early clues; they are sometimes the harbingers of worse things to come. (45, 46)
So you can’t see a losing streak coming, but maybe you can. It would be one thing if such advice could be an read as artfully proposed paradox, but I can’t read it like that because I think hind-sight fallacies are the competent gambler’s last temptation. One needs to be cautioned against them, and this advice seems to me to encourage that vice.
The above quotation comes from the chapter "Calmness and Rhythm." The same message is reworked in the chapter on "Cyclical Luck."
Since poker involves so many borderline decisions, often occurring one after another, it doesn’t hurt to ask yourself from time to time (when trying to make up your mind about which way to go in a hand): "How is my luck running?" Asking yourself this can be helpful in maximizing your good days and minimizing your bad days. (75)
A bit later Phillips insists, "how hot or cold you are is a legitimate factor in the decision-making process." Because it is evident that this author writes out of a great depth of experience and with a real power of reflection I decided that this advice, which seems absolutely wrong for a race or sports bettor, was probably sound with respect to poker. After turning it over in my mind for a long time, I realized that poker decisions concern a changing cast of opponents who one can legitimately feel one has a better or worse read on—and the value of one’s hand is obviously contingent on the quality of that read. It’s also the case that while there are nine races run each day, or twelve professional football games played each week, forty or more poker hands get dealt in an hour and the games go 24-7. So race and sports decision-makers, it seems to me, have to do everything they can to consider and engage all the events they are prepared to consider. A part of this discipline involves teaching themselves to believe that the outcome of their last decision has no bearing on their insight into the next event.
Having realized this, I was pretty pleased with myself. "My goal," I repeated to myself for the thousandth or two-thousandth time, "is to get to the point where I can make 600 bets a year with a 7 percent advantage, and to bet that advantage steadily. I’m gong to find opportunities and I’m not going to trap myself in over-refined distinctions between good, extra-good, and really good bets."
But there is a paragraph in Zen and the Art of Poker that has gotten me to start to rethink the vision that I’ve had for the last few years:
Don’t just downscale your bets when you get cold, downscale the actual way you play the game. Back off within your method of play, alternately loosening up your game when things re going well and tightening back up when they are not. (75)
Bet more when you’re winning and less when your losing is the second oldest gambling advice there is. As I have said, for someone who has developed an orderly way to consider information and who has proven his ability to maintain the effort required by the decision-making framework he’s invented, it seems to me like bad advice. But what’s new here is the advice to "downscale the actual way you play the game." I’ve never heard that formulated before, and its effect has been to expose what is perhaps my false ideal of effort. I plan to consider the prices on about 5500 events (NBA, AL baseball plus NFL football) over a nine month period so as to pick 600 out of them that are mis-priced. This plan assumes my effort will be constant. I recognize that as a season develops I will find more plays, but I want to think that the constancy of my effort will translate into a constant value for my plays. But what if my effort simply can’t be close to constant? What if when I’m winning I do my logging with great joy and look for extra details and begin to feel in sync with the game, and when I’m losing I start to log mechanically and experience a sense of immobility while putting the games together in my head? What if I reframed Phillips’ question, "How is my luck running?" as the question, "What do my most recent results suggest about how skillfully I’ve been making borderline decisions recently?" What if there were an art of gambling one could teach oneself that did not ape the art of managing an investment portfolio? In the baseball season it might take the shape of making my first forty wagers at a five percent level, and then, if I were ahead, allowing myself to bet up to the full advantage projected by my figures. In the football season it might mean that the first three weeks of the season I would expect to find one or two plays that I would bet at a ten percent level. In weeks four and five I would expect to find three or four plays, and if any one of them looked good and I was ahead, a fifteen percent play would be allowed. After week five, if I were ahead three or more units I would look for several maximum advantage plays each week and if I continued to win and feel in tune with the season I would expect my plays warranted fifteen percent backing.
Suddenly I would be more vulnerable to all the classical traps of hopefulness and regret, but the less structured betting structure would also give me a chance to make discriminations I might in fact be capable of making. I can imagine that thirty to forty times during the baseball season I would make a fifty cent price difference that I’d be willing to stand on, and that the spreadsheet would tell me to send in fifteen percent of my bankroll. If I lost a couple of those in a week giving back a month of grindingly accumulated profits, I can imagine I’d be frustrated and gun-shy. I might find my logging turning mechanical, and in order to accommodate this symptom of the shock to my will, I might have to pull back with-in the style of my play. But I can also imagine my prices being right and my luck being good and going on little winning runs that would make my season—and I can even imagine sensing when these runs were over, knowing when to say when. Maybe I would find I could be more disciplined inside this less disciplined way of playing. Maybe I would welcome the volatility and it would be good for me. I’m still thinking about it.
Let’s go back to Reno’s 38% example which is where I was going with this whole post. Let’s say when he posts on whoremongering he’s very happy and writing well and other people are happy too and telling him what a great writer of whoremongering stories he is. So then let’s say his next three posts, points on the technical minutia of his craft, are excellent. But then let’s say some people start dissing his whoremongering posts, so he decides not to write the last one even though he was looking forward to writing it. And then let’s say his next few posts were kind of clunkers and then let’s say he really goes downhill getting into vituperative exchanges with somebody or other. What I’m wondering is if it might be possible that some of Reno’s posts make him feel good and lend their karma to his next posts making them more likely to be good, while others do the opposite. If this is true, the next time he hits a losing streak, Reno should end it by telling us his Thailand stories.
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