Jeffrey

Just read a bit of ToTheEastSide's blog and thought I'd post some of my thoughts on the current health care debate in the US. This is a general complaint from my morose mind and hasn't got much to say about the politics of the situation. This is also too long to probably interest many readers, but I think it's simple and easy to argue for or against.

Not only is insurance causing pricing problems - medical insurance, at least as it exists today, doesn't even make sense. Insuring against buying monthly medication is pretty much the same as insuring against buying groceries. The whole point of insurance is to avoid variance, something poker players know a lot about. Example: if we summarize your yearly income from poker as being either 10BB/100 or -10BB/100, with an 80% chance of 10BB/100 and a 20% chance of -10BB/100 then your EXPECTED win rate for the year is 6BB/100. Remember, we're supposing that at the end of the year you will either come out at 10BB/100 or -10BB/100 and that (unlike the real life) no other option is a possibility. Would you, knowing that your EV was 6BB/100, be willing to pay a .5BB/100 premium to LP.net Insurance in order to ensure that your win rate was 5.5BB/100 for the year?

That's how insurance works: You insure against the possibility of a low-probability, high-impact event. You don't insure against relatively low-impact certainties. You don't insure against buying groceries. We shouldn't insure against monthly medication. Why are you paying a premium to medical companies on top of what you're already expecting to pay?

Insurance has other problems. It creates a lot of fucked up incentives. With a typical insurance company, we have copay (for simplicity's sake I'll ignore other types of insurance, but the principle is basically the same for coinsurance, etc.) Suppose my copay is $25 for any medication I buy. Medical corporations can now price their $35 product at $125 and yet no matter what they price it, demand from the insured is the same because copay is only $25. The whole concept of quantity demanded as a function of price goes right out the window. Profit-maximizing firms are incentivized to raise their prices.

Suppose then that not all of the population is insured. Insurance companies are gonna say "fuck the uninsured demand, I'm raising my prices. I can sell my shit at $125 where I used to sell it at $35, and people [the insured] will still buy it exactly the same as before." In other words, the insured have an extremely inelastic demand cure, meaning they will continue to purchase the medication is though it were $25 even as prices skyrocket. So, given that fact, medical corporations have an incentive to raise prices regardless of the uninsured demand because it benefits them to sell less product (also meaning less costs associated with production) at a substantially greater price. This whole phenomenon forces some of the uninsured to consider purchasing insurance just so they can afford the extreme prices of monthly medication.

Obviously this is a vicious cycle.

Another consideration with regard to insurance is the consumption of doctors' labor. The AMA already has a stranglehold on the number of doctors being licensed so in the USA we already have too few doctors to be called socially efficient. Couple the shortage of doctors with the copay example of how prices rise due to insurance. The price of a doctor's time, already artificially high because of the AMA's licensing procedures, is further increased by the fact that copay pays for all but $25 of a doctor's visit that can range into triple digit prices. Doctors prices are pushed higher, making them unaffordable to the uninsured while the quantity of doctor's labor demanded by the insured remains unchanged. We can imagine some unsavory, if not unlikely results: Suppose that before the introduction of insurance, a doctor's visit was relatively expensive, and suppose that once insurance is produced, a large fraction of the population purchases insurance. Then the quantity demanded for doctor's labor may actually increase due to the introduction of insurance meanwhile, because of the copay system, prices charged by doctors skyrocket. This means that not only will there be a shortage of doctors' labor, but that the condition will persist perhaps completely unchanged in spite of prices becoming incredibly expensive.

Do I think there should be medical insurance? Yeah, for stuff that doesn't happen often and is hugely expensive; not for routine check-ups or monthly/weekly prescriptions.

Sadly, insurance isn't the only problem with medical markets.

The very nature of medical markets disposes them to social inefficiency. As people are constantly pointing out, if you're dying and there's only one company with the cure, you're probably willing to pay a pretty high price to that company. In medical markets there are often no good substitutes for a given treatment; there are R&D/licensing barriers to entering the market; etc. Basically medical markets breed monopoly (or at the very least, they breed inefficiency).

Because medical companies are essentially monopolies reaming public welfare, government regulation of medical markets is absolutely necessary to achieving a socially optimal equilibrium. The breakdown of revenues and costs in medical markets is so far out of economic equilibrium that when I first read it I was hung up on the fact for days. What i'm referring to is neatly summed up in the fact that across the ENTIRE medical market, the mean after-tax accounting profit is over 20% of medical firms' revenues and costs balance. Without going into too much detail, there's a huge economic profit being realized in medical markets, and economic profit is a reliable red flag for social inefficiency. Socially efficient market structures do not yield positive economic profit, so positive economic profit is always suspicious to someone interested in socially optimal outcomes.

So you can see what I'm talking about, compare the following:

Graph

The graph is from 2005. Oil/gas is doing worse than you might expect. If this graph were current, banks and financial shit would be crashing, and I suspect that medical/biotech would stand well away from its competitors in terms of profits reaped. This is important for economic consideration: the fact that medical markets are way better than "the best alternative." Medical markets are raping all the other markets listed, and medical markets are also raping society at large.

A good read courtesy of Savio from TL.net: Overview of US Healthcare

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I'm graduating from university on Saturday. My degree is in economics and I've got what amounts to a minor in math.

Overall I'm not real happy about it.

I applied to several Ph.D programs and none of them panned out. Either I was rejected or I declined at every school. My GRE quantitative was a 780 which is passable for top tier economics programs, but I'm applying from an obscure state university and my GPA is only just over 3.6. Plus I've got virtually nothing else going for me so apparently I don't measure up to the standards of top-tier schools.

I wasn't delighted at the prospect of getting a Ph.D in the first place, but it was basically the only route that seemed to make sense as jobs are scarce and I've got no source of income. Anyway after being rejected at or declining every university, my only option in academics is to stay at the same state university for another year while I pursue a 1-year post-graduate and reapply to Ph.D programs. This is a pretty shitty option as I've lived here my entire life, and I'm bored of it. Moreover the education I get here is generally poor, and in spite of - or perhaps because of the easy courses, I tend to lack motivation and thus both learn less and perform (relatively) poorly.

As I said, I live in Alabama and I always have. It sucks here for all the reasons you'd imagine, and education here is as poor as advertised and possibly worse. Lately I've been trying (despite often lacking real enthusiasm) to make up for lost time and do some self-education plus take the most difficult classes available in math and econ. Unfortunately there are no difficult econ courses here, so that didn't work. Also I've been forced to fill in some curriculum requirements as this is my last semester, and those filler classes were truly horrible wastes of time and energy. One of the math courses, on the other hand, was difficult. It was a topography / analysis course that ended up requiring my full effort, and even then I ended up a little short. I like to think that it was because I had several bullshit classes that wasted my time and sapped my will to study, coupled with my terrible math background, but even so I've never really had any trouble with an academic subject before. So it was a humbling and somewhat draining experience.

Several other aspects of my life sort of suck as I've gradually severed ties with a lot of friends and now only have a sort of core group that I've known all my life. Unfortunately even among my closest friends none of us are really similar enough to have a super solid friendship. It's a strange thing to think and I feel uncomfortable with it, but at times it seems to me that even among my closest friends we're only friends because we've known each other for so long. It seems like we’re dissimilar in every way. Among some of us there are ghosts of serious tension from the past and there’s almost never an atmosphere of relaxed goodwill. Among others there are just no mutual interests or anything like the spontaneity that characterizes healthy relationships. Probably worth acknowledging that I haven’t had a steady girlfriend in over two years, and more recently I’ve become so disgusted with the culture here and the kind of people that it attracts that in the past half a year or so I haven’t made the slightest effort in social situations.

Poker is also going poorly. Don’t really feel like there’s much to be said about it other than that I’ve been able to excel in most other aspects of life and it’s frustrating and humbling to be pretty unsuccessful at poker. I can console myself with the idea that I haven’t put in the time to really be good, but it feels like a hollow reason. Until I succeed at something I usually take lack of success pretty badly and possibly irrationally so, but whatever. It’s still frustrating and with everything else looking dim it’s just one more thing that’s bad rather than good.

Anyway this is really depressing piece of writing and I feel like it’s not even entirely appropriate to post publicly. I guess the relative anonymity of LP makes it pretty inconsequential so I’ll probably post it anyway. My main motivation for writing this was the hope that at some point I’d either see that I was being ridiculous or if I wasn’t being completely ridiculous, I was hoping to spark some idea of what I could do it improve things. Unfortunately no solution has really hit me.

I guess to conclude with a poker analogy, I feel like if life were an NLHE hand then I’ve misplayed it pretty severely thus far. Unfortunately open-folding / check-folding life doesn’t get the next two cards dealt unless you’re a Hindu. So ruling out the fold button really just brings me back to step one. Hopefully I’ll catch a lucky turn or something. But it makes me wonder how many people are in a similar spot and opt to fish. Gotta think that in poker if you’re drawing you mostly miss.

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He's delusional. He can't communicate his ideas. He behaves like a spastic fish at every opportunity.

His non-interventionist policy is so 18th century. We are no longer on the fucking Mayflower and it does not take a month to cross Atlantic. Hello, Mach 5. I can now fuck with you from half the world away.

His Constitution-obsession is retarded. Hello, 3/5ths clause. The Constitution is not divine writ. It is completely fallible.

His political career, according to Wikipedia, got its start when the US finally cut its remaining ties with the gold standard... "After that day, all money would be political money rather than money of real value. I was astounded."

I guess his heart is in the right place and in some sense that puts him ahead of approximately 534 other Congressmen, but he's still retarded. The unadulterated adulation in the UIEGA thread is so misguided, but if he and his cohorts deliver the fish I guess I'll probably forgive him because I'm results oriented like that

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Deposited $100 on PS to toy around w/ while drinking heavily and occasionally studying for exams. Obviously doing the run good and rescuing my Sharkscope from life tilt that occurred a few years back:



I'm also making the transition from NL50 to NL100. Did a bit of the run good at NL100 so that's happy, but I'll probably continue to NL50 it up as I think I'm pretty weak in 6-max cash. Otherwise running and playing pretty well in sundry other games. Mainly beasting / running good at NL50 HU and in assorted 6-max / HU SNGs. BR is staying afloat and increasing. Don't care much about the money and don't really expect to ever win enough money at poker for it be more than a diversion with some cash flying around. Nonetheless I'm pretty obsessed and constantly watching CR videos and running numbers so hopefully I'll achieve a low degree of mastery.

Rest of life sucks and is running pretty much way below or exactly at expectation. Can't really decide which. I really hate studying and can never bring myself to do it for more than an hour or two so expected happiness is going way down over the next couple weeks as I deal with finals

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was watching a myth CR video and i had an epiphany. i used to think i was a nit at heart. i'm actually a station. i don't like making so many blogs but this is such a huge revelation for me that i've gotta make a note here in case i one day become extremely famous. then i can look back and be like "yeah see, poker changed my life. right here i discovered i was a station when i thought i was a nit. and this changes everything."

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Roommate's brother was over. Guy basically runs like Jesus. Won some 9-man SNG playing any two all-in all day. I was jealous since I'm still running like death at 6-max so I asked him what was up. At some point in the conversation my roommate wanted to take the brother's car to another town so he could get to church tomorrow. I was playing 6-max at the time and spewing money like a Jew recently turned hedonist. To help assuage my frustration I naturally lashed out at my roommate's religiosity. I made fun of him for a while and as I began to run worse my comments veered heavily into the blasphemous.

At some point it was suggested that my lack of faith was a possible cause for my bad run. I sensed opportunity. I offered God a propbet: If my luck turned around and I ended up at neutral or better, before midnight, I would be at church on Sunday. As of 11:58 my BR was +$6.

God 1 - 0 me.

Ship a capital G and me at church. Well-played sir.

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I usually feel confident in my NL50 HU. I typically run pretty good (compared to my atrocious 6-max luck) and the players on FTP aren't typically playing like geniuses. Today was mostly the same way but there was one guy I played for an hour or two before dinner and he totally raped me. Never felt my soul being sucked from my chest before. I even sucked out on him once and he still slammed me for like 3 BI. He was like a dementor from harry potter or whatever. All-in-all a good but expensive experience.

In other news Charter Telecommunications or whatever needs to go ahead and file for fucking Chapter 11. I hate the fucking company and if I could ever clone myself, some of my clones would definitely go on murderous rampages against Charter. As usual Charter fucked with me all day long, pretending my internet was fixed and then patiently waiting... probably in a perch with binoculars... staring at my screen, waiting ever so patiently for me to flop the absolute nuts... waiting for me to be on the verge of coolering someone in a 200bb pot... and then pulling the plug, only to restore the internet moments later so I could savor my hand flying into the muck

I fucking hate Charter. Just one more way for me to run way below expectation at 6-max. I don't know if the government has granted Charter a fucking monopoly but I hate the government too just in case it did. God will give me justice.

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TWO lines diverged on a Cartesian-plane
And I took the one oft bitched about
And it is LAME.





I REALLY do not like NL25 and will probably REFUSE to return to it even if my BR continues to get ravaged so please stop shitting on me! It's either bad run outs shitting on my redline or suck outs shitting on my showdown winnings or it's bad beats just shitting all over my whole being. I really don't think I was running THAT good before, but I'd gladly go back to the positive profit range and run a little below EV or around EV or a little above or WAY WAY WAY above EV like there's an awesome rubber band effect that's going to make these lines converge and then the bold one shoot WAY over the light one.

UGH, I'm more covered in full tilt's shit than that kid in Slumdog Millionaire.

Anyway, I REPENT of my previous posts and I HATE everyone who said I was running good because you have DOOMSWITCHED me HARD, and being 8 BI below EV is lame PLUS getting coolered / sucked out upon / blah blah and I am NOT EVEN BLUFFING ABOUT RUNNING BAD IN THESE OTHER AREAS. I AM SO UPSET WITH EVERYONE WHO SAID I WAS RUNNING GOOD. In fact if I knew how to underline "SO" in HTML I would spam that SO MUCH just so you understood that I am NOT happy.

How cathartic

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I like to bet, but it seems to be a bad strategy at the moment. I think I'm charging headlong into the top of my opponent's ranges AND impaling myself without them having to lift a finger. Still, I like charging so it's lame for them to bayonet me.

On the other hand, I'm wondering if I'm ACTUALLY running into the top of their ranges, and I'll probably do some more review to make sure I'm not leveling myself into shipping too light. I should probably post some hands to get some comments.

I decided Yomer was definitely right about me spewing while trying to imitate Durrr. I'm trying to curtail my excitement at playing poker again, tightening up a bit etc.

I feel like I've improved a bit in the last couple days in several areas: some of my PF spew has been cut off; I've begun to handle 3bets and 3bet pots significantly better; and the quality of my bluffs has increased in sizing, timing and spot selection.

All that said, I'm getting crushed pretty hardcore in ALL-IN EV, about 6 BI or so under as I approach the 10k hand mark. The beats were rather demoralizing at first but quickly became comical as no single beat was THAT painful but instead the bad luck mostly occurred in pots against half stacks so it was something like a running succession of losing 65:35s, 75:25s, and 80:20s.

One thing I realized pretty quickly this time around is that pretty much no session is likely to be be perfect as the probabilities in hold 'em are often 80-90% chance of victory at best. Following that epiphany I realized that I would be agonizing over the inevitable if I was upset about bad beats/coolers etc. Hopefully that will be easily internalized so I can enjoy playing.

Anyway as for my results, they weren't good. I'm actually about 2BI below where I started (although surprisingly most of my losses have come post-tightening so my experiment with loose play COULD be termed a success - though I think educational would be a better term than successful). Atop the poor ALL-IN EV, I had a REALLY high frequency of hideous run outs for my big pairs, and actually very little action on big pairs overall. Also had a surprising number of suck outs by draws and random over cards calling down for one or even two streets. I also made some weird hero calls and perhaps even more hero bluffs, but I feel that both were pretty educational and wasn't altogether upset about losing/winning in those spots. Finally the collisions with what I believed to be the tops of my opponents' ranges were quite expensive.

Overall I guess this would be termed a standard swing, but it was distressing because every aspect of my game was completely ravaged rather than just my weaknesses. The only thing I was relatively happy with was that I didn't become a crazy tilt monkey at any point and didn't make many more than the sort of amateurish mistakes that are to be expected.

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I quit poker a while back for what must have been the third time. I was playing NL50 and doing pretty well over a sample size of around 10k or so. Overall I was pretty happy to have progressed from NL25 to NL50, and to have managed a reasonable win rate at NL50.

More importantly, by the time I quit I could confidently say that I was better than most NL50 players on FTP at the time. Although beating NL50, and having a theoretical advantage at NL50 is not really a point of pride for me, I want to acknowledge that it's possible for me to have run good over the 10k hand sample(or any finite sample size) and achieve a much higher win rate than my actual expectation. Since actual win rate doesn't necessarily reflect expected winnings, and expected winnings are the true reflection of a player's ability, I think that it's important to have some theoretic idea about how your game compares with your opponents' games. Incidentally I think theory is a much more certain and cost efficient way to learn games of uncertainty than to play to whatever you can to consider a significant sample and then compare your win rate to what people suggest is a good win rate. I'd like to hear opinions on gauging your game by theoretic results versus actual results over a long sample. To clarify: I don't mean ALL-IN EV versus winnings because it's possible to run really hot card-wise and of course ALL-IN EV can't reflect the possibility that you're basically playing the top of your range all day long).

Anyway, I quit like half a year ago... Probably some time in September. I'm such a mercurial asshole that I became obsessed with Starcraft for a few weeks and abandoned poker for that. Then when I recognized I hated every job associated with my undergrad in economics, I decided to get a Ph.D... so I studied for the GRE etc and worked up a bunch of applications. In the mean time I pretty much forgot about poker.

I was reading LP about a month ago and I saw the big hand between Greenstein and Durrr in some thread. I bought Ace on the River years ago with my first PS points and finally read it like a year ago, so naturally I'm a pretty big Greenstein fan and automatically had to see the Greenstein versus Durrr pot... I was really impressed by Durrr's ability to take a 500k beat so I watched all the episodes of High Stakes Season 5 and was motivated to start playing again.

I suddenly remembered that I had around 1.3k sitting around on FTP. I'm not rich so I have no idea why I was just letting 1.3k sit for half a year on FTP. Anyway I'm totally irrational so as soon I remembered the money I thought "LOL 1.3k that I didn't remember. Certainly won't care if I lose it all. Let's go play NL50 like I'm Durrr!"

I used to be on the nitty side of TAG so I decided that I would just double my VPIP/PFR. I told myself that if I spewed a few hundred $ I'd probably feel a lot like cashing out the rest. So anyway it's an ongoing experiment but here are my first results:





I've been playing only a couple tables so my volume is low, and of course that makes running a bit under ALL-IN EV to be sort of a bummer, but it's not too discouraging since I'm still winning. My last few sessions have also been gay as I've had to fold way more than I like and my red line has plummeted accordingly. All-in-all though, it's liberating to play a more loose game on less tables because I enjoy the game and that makes up for the lower income per session.

I guess I'm finding that my desire for money (barring a massive windfall) is pretty low so I'm content to play a lower volume. This is sort of a surprise for me as I'd always imagined that I'd want more money as I grew older and "toys" became more expensive. Just the opposite has happened however as much of what I want is actually pretty cheap. Well anyway, I'd love to hear people's opinions on loose play at low stakes and on evaluating play from a theoretic perspective rather than a statistic perspective.

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