The People Have Spoken

Ronnie Bardah Makes an Appearance

In Chapter 5 of our textbook, we discuss many of the common discrete random variables that you encounter in a probability course, such as Bernoulli, binomial, Poisson, etc.

In this vein, I thought that Exercise 5.12 at the end of the chapter was pretty neat:

A Reflection on my Thinking Poker Podcast Appearance

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A few weeks ago, I was invited to be a guest on the Thinking Poker Podcast to talk about my experience teaching probability using poker. The episode just went up, so check it out here: http://www.thinkingpoker.net/2017/10/episode-231-peter-chi/ or via any podcast app that you normally use, and just search for the show called Thinking Poker Podcast.

To any new readers who have found this blog via the podcast, welcome! To ongoing readers, thanks for finding your way back here this week. I invite you to check out the podcast episode if you haven't already. 

To everyone: this post will deviate a bit from my typical post. Usually this semester I've just been talking about teaching probability. But my mind is on something else right now, so here we go, and I hope to see you on the other side.

If you'd like to subscribe for email notifications when new posts go up in the future, click here or enter your email address in the sidebar. 

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Midterm Exam

I'm a bit late getting this week's post up because I've just been slammed.

I have been working on it for a while actually, but probably won't get it posted until tomorrow or possibly Friday. In the meantime, as a placeholder, here is the Midterm Exam that they just took. Enjoy!

What to do About Variance

Poker players tend to have a reasonable understanding of variance. We understand that if we put all our money in with the best hand at any point before the river, we still might not win. We also understand that it takes extremely large sample sizes to demonstrate anything meaningful about whether you are a winning player or not. Because variance.

As such, I initially thought that Variance would be one of the topics in my course that would be quite natural to teach with a poker framework in place. Unfortunately, it's been a bit of a challenge.

Poker Night, Podcasting, and the Professor Goes to Parx

Just a few quick hits for this post:

1) We had our 2nd poker night for the class last week. I also opened it up to our ASA Club, and my colleague (Professor Lisa Grossbauer, pictured below) advertised it to her classes as well.

That Cash Just Looks So Sweet

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Last time in my preamble, I shared that @NateMeyvis of the Thinking Poker Podcast has been offering free copies of his ebook on tournament poker strategy if you send him a copy of your receipt for a >$5 donation to a Houston and/or Irma-related charity.

He just tweeted that the offer is now being extended to Puerto Rico charities as well. Nate has asked for receipts to be sent to the following email address: backing at fastmail dot fm; if you've donated, send a copy of your receipt there to get a copy of his book in return.

Onto the post...

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Thanks mostly to @RichTRyan, formerly of the PokerNews Podcast, the phrase in the title of this post is something that I've heard spoken by Phil Ivey many times: Rich Ryan would drop the sound bite containing Ivey saying this whenever it might even remotely pertain to whatever was being discussed (or even sometimes when it didn't).

Tactile Simulation of a 2006 WSOP Final Table Hand

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Although it's been a few weeks since Harvey hit, and over a week since Irma hit, I recently caught wind that one of the hosts of a podcast that I listen to (@NateMeyvis of the Thinking Poker Podcast) has been offering free copies of his ebook on tournament poker strategy if you send him a copy of your receipt for a >$5 donation to a Houston and/or Irma-related charity.

Lish and I have been thinking that Houston and Florida are both probably going to need money for some time to come still, so I figured I would help spread the word despite it having been a bit since the disasters. Nate has asked for receipts to be sent to the following email address: backing at fastmail dot fm; if you've donated, send a copy of your receipt there to get a copy of his book in return.

Now, onto the post!

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Let's go back to the beginning for a minute: the very first page of the textbook we've been using opens with the following...

Rule of Two, Rule of Four, and the Professor Makes a Mistake, or Three...

A couple of well-known shortcuts for estimating probabilities of coming from behind are the Rule of Two and the Rule of Four, which are as follows:

Problem Gambling and Dan Bilzerian (two unrelated topics!) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Last week, we spent some time in class talking about problem gambling. I wanted to make sure to give a careful treatment of this in the event that any of my students really do get into poker (or other forms of gambling) as a result of how much we're playing in this class, and tell them some things I wish I knew when I got started. The author of our textbook told me that he also does this.

The first thing that surprised me was how difficult it was to find good resources to help me discuss the topic. For example, the first google hit brought me here. Right out the gates, this webpage says, "The odds are never in your favor whether it is poker, blackjack, or anything else..."

Day 1

We are up and running! I have set our Canvas page (course webpage) to be public, so feel free to have a look at that (the link is also in the "pinned" post at the top of my blog).

In the first reading assignment, which was due before our first class yesterday, I asked a survey question: "How much experience do you have with Texas Hold'em and/or with poker in general? Feel free to be as brief or as detailed as you would like." It was a free-response question so I've taken some liberties with the categorization, but with n=20, the distribution basically looked like this:

Back After Five Years

It's been almost five years since I have written an entry in this blog! My impetus for reviving this blog now is because of the book that I'll be using for a class that I'll be teaching this Fall. The class is an undergraduate course in Probability for Math majors, and I have decided to use this textbook as a primary, required text for the course:

I have taught probability courses several times, and have already tended to use some examples from gambling and poker. So, what is the difference through using this book? Basically, poker will no longer be just the occasional example, but rather will become the basis of pretty much everything that we do. Additionally, I plan to use class time to have the students actually play poker, in an attempt to obtain full buy-in from all of my students for this framework. I'll be operating under the assumption that some students may have little or no experience with Texas Hold'em, so I'll be starting from the ground up and teaching them the rules of the game and having them play on Day 1.

The appeal of this pedagogically is that, once we get going, it should interest many students much more than the classic examples in standard probability texts. However, as excited as I am about this, there are certainly some valid concerns, as brought up by a couple friends/colleagues on my Facebook wall when I posted about it there.

I'll hold off further discussion of that for later posts, though; once the semester is approaching, I plan to blog regularly about my experiences with this. But, right now I just want to get back in the swing of writing posts. To that end...

A quick recap of the past five years:
I completed my Ph.D., Lish and I got married, we moved to California for my first job as an Assistant Professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and then we moved to the Philadelphia area where I am now an Assistant Professor at Ursinus College.

On the poker side of things, kind of a lot has happened there as well. Towards the end of my time as student at UW, I had stopped playing online after Full Tilt and PokerStars got shut out of the U.S. market (on "Black Friday": April 15th, 2011). I had just over $3k locked up on Full Tilt when that happened, which was pretty huge for a small-timer like me.

Fast forward to our move to SLO in 2013, and the return of Full Tilt player funds was still under negotiations with the DOJ. However, around this time, I decided that I wanted to play online again. I looked into it a bit, and confirmed that while the status on the operating side is fuzzy, there is no law prohibiting the *play* of online poker, neither at the Federal level nor in the state of California. The real problem was, aside from the $3k I had locked up in Full Tilt, the rest of my operating poker roll had gotten eaten up by necessary expenditures as I was finishing grad school. So I was going to have to start from scratch.

Long story short, over some time I managed to rebuild a halfway respectable roll, from an initial deposit of $50 that I borrowed from the Chi Operating Budget. Additionally, some good things happened in 2014. First this, in February:

Hello old friend! Wasn't sure if I'd ever see you again... took almost 3 years to get you back. (Yes, this was my Full Tilt money; it says POKER STARS because PokerStars bought Full Tilt Poker, and as part of the deal, PokerStars was in charge of reimbursing the frozen Full Tilt player funds).


And then, there was this nice score -- I did this on my last night of JSM (the big annual statistics conference) in Boston:

A few weeks after that, I binked another medium-field, $30-ish buy-in tournament for roughly a grand, and a couple months after that, I took about $1200 from a $3/5 no-limit game at Chumash Casino (about 50 minutes from SLO).

So in 2014, things were looking pretty solid from a poker standpoint.

Around this time, we knew that we would be moving from California, and by January of 2015, we knew that it would be Philadelphia. Simultaneously, the WSOP itch was strong in me again, AND the timing of our move was going to line up such that we would drive through Vegas pretty much right around the time of the Main Event. So I decided that I was going to make a serious push at winning a seat again.

(The one time I have won a seat was in 2006. See recap here, across several posts: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. Since then, the closest that I have come was in 2010 when I went deep in a satellite, made it down to two players, and eventually got it all-in with the best hand but it did not hold up).

So for the 2015 effort... first, I poured many hundreds into online satellites. No luck there. I also played in a live satellite at the Bicycle Casino down in LA (a 3 hour drive from SLO - I had very generous cousins put me up, thx Vince and Esther), for an entry of something like $250. Didn't connect on that either. Meanwhile, I also hit a killer downswing in cash games (on the order of a couple grand), plus I paid taxes on my 2014 winnings, which was a good chunk as well.

We start our move across the country and I'm down to about $2k in the roll. I'm determined to make one final push in Vegas, even if it means wiping out my entire roll... "I've built from scratch before, and I'll do it again if I have to," I tell myself.

So, we arrive in Vegas, and first, I enter a side event:

This was the $777 buy-in Lucky 7s event, a four-day event that drew 4,422 players and had a first prize of $487,784. If things go well for me here, I would put some of it towards a Main Event seat. Unfortunately... no luck for me, as I lasted about 6 hours into Day 1 and that was the end of me.

After that, I basically just played in a bunch of live satellites, with buy-ins in the $200 range. Busted, busted, busted, busted.

So the dream was not to be, in 2015. We rolled into Philly with me having about $300 in the roll, basically not a roll at all by most standards.

I haven't played all that much since we arrived, so that's basically where things stand at this point.

What's on the horizon:
1) The probability class, as mentioned above. This has revived my overall interest in poker. I've been in touch with my contact at PokerNews.com, and will be writing a few articles for them about my experience.

2) In June, I am participating in the AP Statistics Reading, where 800 statistics teachers/professors get together for a week to grade the AP Statistics Exams from this year. One night during this is the so-called "Applied Probability Night" aka Casino Night, where they will run shuttles for us to Harrah's KC. I looked into it, and at least as of now, the poker room at this Harrah's has a nice little $60 re-buy tournament that runs on the night we'll be going there. I posted about it on the AP Readers Facebook wall, and have garnered up some interest there so maybe we'll have a nice crew of us playing in it.

If anything noteworthy happens, that'll be my next post.