she anwers the title question in the last paragraph: "curiosity is everything, losing is a part of playing, and our opponents in life are less important than the choices we make ourselves."
I don't know why I expected more, guess I'm still prone to clickbait. Nonetheless, her story is interesting anyway. But she doesn't answer the real leading question of her story, which was whether she won against the misogynistic Dan B. (quick google search didn't help me with that..).<p>Actually, the best advice in the article is in the middle: "don’t play when tired, stressed or distracted."
Did I miss it or does she never actually say WHY she has to go on to play this dude? She talks about how now this tournament is being arranged for her after winning a tournament that her coaches pressured her into playing, but never says anything like “it turned out that winning this tournament meant I was obligated to go play against this butthead dude”.<p>If there is something like that then it feels like she’s omitting an important lesson of “look before you leap” from the summing-up of What I Learnt. Which is one her coach needs to maybe learn too since he was just as surprised.
I became very interested in both poker and machine learning when I happened to be present for the opening of this event: <a href="https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2017/january/AI-beats-poker-pros.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2017/january/AI-be...</a><p>Reasoning through imperfect information scenarios, and developing emotional resilience when unlikely negative outcomes occur, are two of the skills I cherish the most. I think poker is brilliantly analogous to both prediction markets and leading/lagging social trends and emotions that surround them.
Is anyone here familiar with current state of poker AIs / bots? For a long time, I've been thinking about making a multiplayer bot that would be able to play at a somewhat decent level but it seems like an extremely hard problem.<p>I've read the Pluribus paper but it assumes fixed stack sizes and more importantly, would be very hard to implement. There has to be a simpler approach.
For everyone getting riled up about her emotional state, relax. Of course she is playing up her ambivalence. It's an advertisement for her book (and maybe for pokercode).<p>Oh, I did think this was hilarious.
> instead of joining a Zoom party with friends, I spent New Year's Eve studying my charts until early hours in the morning<p>Yeah, I'm sure you were really sorry to miss it! /s Staying up for a virtual midnight countdown sounds like something I'd scramble for any excuse to skip.
Playing a poker can also be an interesting mental exercise. I occasionally play 3-4 tables concurrently online, of which I ultimately focus on a single one I always-eventually get lucky in (it might take a dozen games but the single one usually pays the rest off), and the amount of exhaustion you feel after 6-7 hours of that is surprising. Nothing like what programming gives me. I have heard similar experiences from ex-professional chess players.
This seems like she’s been conned into providing a contrarian narrative as an advertisement. I wonder how many women are going to lose their livelihoods in a bid to prove the narrative: that they can beat men in poker.
Serious question about this. The starting hand chart appears to indicate that K4os is a surprisingly superior hand to other similar high low combinations. It's there a reason or is the chart wrong?
Poker changed my thinking when I was 18 in a very powerful way [1]: always look for +EV [2] opportunities in life and do your best to minimize variance. It started out small, but now I view everything through that lens. Too bad I didn't see "picking out a college degree" that way, it would've saved a lot of time (and pain).<p>IMO this is fundamentally different than how most of my fellow CS classmates tend to think. A programmer thinks in quite a deterministic and non-probability based fashion. Almost all of them hated statistics because of it since it requires to put that probabilistic hat on. Not all of them, but most tend to.<p>Because of this type of thinking I have taken crazy long shot decisions. Why? In many situations there is nothing to lose and a lot to gain. I'd always then hear: "yea but it won't work, you're not gonna make it." Well, if I take long shot chances like that every day then the law of large numbers will be on my side. "Yea that's all nice and theoretical but it will never work!"<p>Have I told you about that time where I got on an exclusive party bus by offering to buy them a keg of beer (since I noticed they were out) while the entry ticket was $100? "But that's just lucky!"<p>Have I told you about a time where the corona dip happened and I did a value investment play into solid brick and mortar companies? "But that's just lucky!"<p>Have I told you about a time where I lost my bus ticket (to another country) and asked the bus driver to pick me up anyway just believing my story? "But that's just lucky in an unlucky situation!"<p>Have I told you about a time where I dated this model for a while? "Dude, you're just incredibly lucky."<p>Have I told you about all the times where things didn't pan out? "No" Well, that's because I forget them but I do remember that a lot more didn't pan out. But again, law of large numbers :)<p>"Yea, that's nice theory."<p>I just gave you 4 examples of it!<p>"Yea, but you're just lucky."<p>I'm not, my volume is high. The only luck I have is despite giving you a rational and empirical argument that someone like you (a CS student) still won't believe me. How is that luck? The competition on these type of long shots is incredibly low which increase my odds.<p>[1] And I never even became a professional! When I got to a semi pro level (consistently beating $.25/$.50 stakes) I found it unethical to continue. Back then my reasoning was: why would I not contribute anything to society while I can learn programming instead and actually build something for society? So I became a programmer instead.<p>[2] Positive expected value
The article is low at content. So I'll try to condense it:<p>- Don't play (or make big decision) when tired, stressed or distracted<p>- Thinking in probability, not in winning or losing terms: EV = Probability x V -or- EV = SUM (Pi x Vi)<p>- Process is more important than result: if you did everything right but still lost, you're fine. Don't dwell on your losses, move on.<p>- You can increase your winning significantly if you get trained. There are probability cards to study Poker, buy them.<p>I'm not interested in people in the story so I didn't summarize them.<p>PS: Woman can win at poker, too if that's not obvious.