The Chevalier de M´er´e (1650s) won alot of money gambling on throwing at
least one 6 after four throws of a single fair six-sided die. Is the probability of this event occuring
greater than or less than 1/2
?
i will comment on my experience in poker over these 4 months, since i played 44k hands of HU during that time.
In march i adopted a strategy of never playing more than 4 tables and game selecting a little harder, ONCE AND FOR ALL!!! I had been switching between mass tabling and 4 tabling but just decided to stick with 4 tables forever. (Anyway, it's not a new strategy, i've tried it ever since being inspired by longple's success a few years back.)
This strategy was so i could(hopefully) improve faster than the other regs. I also stopped playing zoom, and only played the slow 6max tables to give me time to observe everything. I've never improved as much in such a short time span as that 4 month period playing poker.
Playing only on pokerstars i'd be surprised if you can get more than 3k hands vs fish in a month from bumhunting hu. (1fish a day, average of 100 hands).
So i'd say about 75%+ of my hands were against regs. Since the worser regs dodge every reg, it was mostly vs the top 10% skilled regs of each limit. (there were some tilted regs willing to play sometimes)
Are people still improving?
Of course they are. To put it in perspective, in 2012 when i started getting into midstakes i knew a reg that would play everyone they could HU, and would grind a lot of 6max, making 400k a year. They refused to improve and relied on their innate gift of mass tabling to win $, and in 2013 they are breakeven over 1mill+ hands, and free money for me to play HU. They recently started dodging me. When i first played them in 2012 they crushed me. I'd say there are a lot of regs like this.
The rate of improvement in poker is still big, but the game is 90% table selection nowdays, which kinda sucks.
And i am suspicious of some of the players these days that make terrible mistakes like opening way too loose from utg(24%)and still have a giant winrate. A lot of the Russians seem pretty bad to me and have average table selection but seem to make a ton of money. Im not the only one that has this suspicion.
So an interesting coincidence came across me today
i was reading a noam chomsky excerpt which basically says the chicago school of economics ignored a huge part of adam smiths philosphy when nobel prize winner, geroge stigler wrote: selections from the wealth of nations.
'It's likely he never opened The Wealth of Nations. Just about everything he said about the book was completely false.'
'Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be.'
so i take another attempt at reading the wealth of nations. One of the most difficult books i've tried to read to be honest. I look up division of labor on wikipedia.
so i find that quote in the wealth of nations at page 410.
'The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life... But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it''
adam smith goes on to talk alot about more about this, but i don't want to quote a whole chapter. You can read this yourself.
Karl marx also has a very similar view, you can find this on page 4 of his economic and philisophical manuscript.
'The accumulation of capital increases the division of labor, and the division of labor increases the number of workers. Conversely, the number of workers increases the division of labor, just as the division of labor increases the accumulation of capital. With this division of labor on the one hand and the accumulation of capital on the other, the worker becomes ever more exclusively dependent on labor, and on a particular, very one-sided, machine-like labor at that. Just as he is thus depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine''
The 2nd interesting part is that straight after i this i watch a good ted talk about motivation in work.
The last two minutes of the ted talk is the interesting thing, he doesn't really bring up that Adam Smith was as much into meaning as Karl Marx was. So this is just another very subtle example, imo at how even the most intelligent, scientific people are indoctrinated.
Im just going to delve into my own speculation now.
Our indoctrination is partly from a massive surplass of information. If we are to even try to decipher history and indoctrinated public opinion and attitudes it takes a lot of reading. Something that almost no one can do as they have too many distractions in their life already. There is also an increasing amount of concision in todays media, people have degrading concentration spans. Twitter only allows you to post 140 characters for example. it seems to me that indoctrination is just going to become more and more easy as information increases and the dehumanization of the human concentration span increases too. There is an interesting opinion written about the distintegration of humans aljazeera, which covers this a little bit. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/03/201332882423542636.html
