Unfortunately, in terms of winning strategies, this couldn't be further from how the game actually plays out today. Back when online poker exploded onto the scene, the old cash game pros quickly discovered that their way of playing the game (described in books like super system and theory of poker) was obsolete.
Seeing veteran poker pros getting crushed in their home turf by teenagers whose playing style was forged in the crucible of online multitabling was the ultimate expose to that old mystique of poker as a psychological battle of deception. One could say that the internet players through their mechanistic play were approximating strategies that were at their core, algorithmic. It's not at all surprising then, to see poker bots today utterly crush certain variants of the game. It won't be long, before poker as a whole succumbs.
That chess is less robotic, is perhaps not obvious. A postmodern skepticism of “even in principle” thinking is part of it: who cares what’s possible in principle, when in practice that is inaccessible to me? The actual narrative is me versus this player, my blunders versus her blunders, and whoever blunders less wins. There is a Platonic Form of perfect play that has no blunders? It is discovered by computers? See, this is something I had to acclimate to in learning chess, because chess engines are available, they will rank your games and tell you that this opening is slightly better than that opening by a tenth of a pawn, and you have to like just throw them in the trash. It's like a standard of beauty that demands you have half a percent body fat and rippling abs and bench 300 easy. And instead you have the desire to be Interesting, rather than to be True.
I play some openings because they are silly, you chase my knight in a massive circle around the board and then I am totally undeveloped but you are questionably developed and it is not clear you are doing better. Gone are the days of memorized 20-deep trees of Sicilian openings where I got a careful half-pawn advantage in my theory and then turned out to blunder my queen and erase it all. That was, if you like, a half-life.
Here is a good post on bots, if you haven't seen it: https://int8.io/counterfactual-regret-minimization-for-poker...
Over the last 15 years or so high level poker strategy has increasingly focused on approximating GTO play, and people are moving away from any type of exploitative play, whether that's psychological tells or adjusting to weaknesses like an opponent folding too much. So a GTO player actually will bluff quite frequently, but it's due to the math indicating that it's an advantageous spot to do it, not because of anything he's observed about his opponent.
That said, there's still room to adjust to exploit an opponent, and the weaker the opponent is the more profitable it can be to deviate from "correct" play.
(cue the often useless, recursive aspects of pop-culture game theory)
Clarification: If you played with cards face up no one would ever make a mistake. You could calculate the odds and the math would be perfect. The goal of poker is to make an opponent make a mathematically incorrect play.
The most interesting part now is the meta. Once you know someone well it's easier to find their tells. Unless they know that and adjust. The final 4 at the table is really fun every week.
In my experience if I talk confidently and get the first word in it's pretty easy to cast aside suspicion. In fact, one meta strategy is to kill someone, then report the body yourself and immediately accuse someone else. I've done this when someone witnessed me killing someone, and I actually got -them- voted off. It's all good and fun but I did feel rather scummy for a bit after. :)
Another strategy is to follow someone for a bit in the beginning, such that if you were the imposter you could've killed them, leading them to trust you. Then in voting sessions that person will likely vouch for you.
Do you usually play with friends? This is definitely not a stable strategy in the repeated Among Us game with the same players :) (although it is quite effective to start! Assuming nobody else is also using it.)
> Another strategy is to follow someone for a bit in the beginning, such that if you were the imposter you could've killed them, leading them to trust you. Then in voting sessions that person will likely vouch for you.
This is called being a “third impostor” (whenever there are two impostors in the round [0]) and it appears to be a little bit more stable, but then casts suspicion on you once you start leaving between kills, among other things. So it’s not fully stable, but some amount of randomness in your playing can also make this strategy viable. (I.e., doing the same when you’re both an impostor and a crew mate with nonzero probability.)
I almost always play the variant where we cannot know whether the person voted out was an impostor or not, so read the above with that in mind. The other variation (where voted players have their type revealed) one also has interesting meta-game strategies like “vouching,” where a player will say “if you vote red and they aren’t the Impostor, then immediately vote me.” This strategy is only exploitable as an impostor when they are close to a win, which makes it a very strong signal of truthfulness in the early game [1].
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[0] And is usually just called (n+1)th impostor whenever there are n impostors in a round.
[1] Impostors can exploit this in the late game, if the cooldown for emergency meetings is long-ish. For example: whenever an impostor pair is three kills away from a win, an impostor can kill (leaving two people for a win), self-report, and then vouch. Then the pair can just do a double kill and win immediately after the end of voting + cooldown.
The game is so simple, and the meta-game is pretty simple too, but the meta-meta-game changes every round as people die and are voted off. It really hurt my brain quite a bit until I figured out that I was watching a meta-meta-game; and it still does hurt my brain a bit.
Back in the 90's, I played a game called Command & Conquer. And if I used all my resources, I could attack an enemy base and defeat it. But on one game, I didn't leave enough resources behind to survive a counter attack. I replayed it over and over each time, to my surprise, making the same mistake. I finally forced myself to have more of a backup.
And I realized that I was living my life that way. I had very little in the way of backup. In my mind, it took away from whatever I was trying to do. "Why have savings? That money could be spent on my project!" It was a good lesson and I owe it to that moment, in that game.
In poker, you can play perfectly and still lose. That is true in almost every field of life. Or, to give it more nuance, you can play exceptionally well and only win a little, whereas someone has had greater luck can play relatively poorly and win a lot.
Only true over the short term: all you have to do is play GTO poker over an infinite number of hands in a rake free game and you should at least break even I think!
That said, this fact is the main reason that the game of poker really "works". If playing perfectly (or at least at a much higher level than your opponents) allowed you to always best your opponents, then you'd quickly find yourself out of opponents. There needs to be enough luck involved to keep losing players coming back to the table (the same reason most casino games have a thin house edge).
Poker can be an absolutely soul crushing game to play professionally. "Running bad" where you lose money over 10's or 100's of thousands of hands even while playing well can make you seriously question your sanity. It can also cause you to add subtle (or not so subtle) errors into your game (e.g. playing too cautiously or aggressively) which can turn your once winning game into a losing game, making it tough to decide whether you are currently a winning player running bad, or actually a losing player.
The other one is not being afraid of "tough" decisions - often, decisions are tough because all options are close in value. The closer their value is, the less it matters to choose the "correct" path, keeping in mind the future is unknowable and we always have imperfect information.
The way I like to think about it is that whenever you face uncertainty, your actions might seemingly be proven wrong in retrospect, but may still have been correct based on your past knowledge.
That's undoubtedly correct, but I find it sometimes difficult to apply, since there's always the possibility that you could have overlooked important information, or that you are using that logic as an excuse. In poker, different from real life, you always know exactly what you know and what you don't know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durak
You should play 1v1 or 2v2.
The game involves random chance because of what cards you get.
The game involves strategy because of how you choose to attack and how you choose to defend, which can lead to major strategic advantages later on.
The game involves deception because your opponents can attack based on what you defend with, and when you lose the defense your opponent knows what weak cards you have. The goal is to give an impression of what strengths you have which are false.
Deception is definitely not the central focus of the game, but it helps. I noticed that someone skilled will typically win 7/10 games vs someone who is a novice.
You wouldn't see so many scholar's mate games if this was the case.
The only really big one I came up with is that some people are just toxic and you have to mute them and play around them as best as possible.
I miss those days.
I don't know whether I should have stayed around after the high-performers left.
Especially how to insult people in Russian.
reference: https://int8.io/counterfactual-regret-minimization-for-poker...
It scales automatically to number of players so we’ve had multiple tables going at once in a game that collapse down as players are eliminated.
Pokerstars is a beast, it opens a million windows, but I gotta admit, it’s also got a million features - though once it did incorrectly decide the winning hang which left all of us scratching our heads and 1 person very upset.
Most superior mammals are learning by playing for a reason.
Unless we're talking about poker and you develop a gambling addiction.
"Among Us" seems to be displacing the previous game "Town of Salem". Maybe people like the more real-time aspects? ("Among Us" also seems to inspire more "drama".) They're both in the "social deduction" genre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_deduction_game There's an old game called "Mafia" in the same genre. (I guess "Mafia-like" might be a bit ambiguous as the name of a genre.)
"Purp did it. I was right there and saw 'em."
"Me too. We were both in the room and he just killed red."
"Listen. In my defense... I have this knife..."
If you haven't tried "offline" versions of these games they're a blast.
Not being to find the best move leads to sub-optimal play which then offers tactical back-and-forth games. In my live games, I also try to use openings (e.g. Sicilian Najdorf, KIA) that reward sharp playmaking, inviting human error.
"Bluffing" in chess could be interpreted as "gambits": giving up material in exchange for attacking tempo/positional value. The bold bet is that despite your material disadvantage, you can still beat them before the game ends. "Deception" could be feinting a queenside push, only to position your army for a kingside endgame.
One Night Ultimate Werewolf capitalized on the "Old Spice Guy" ads and had Isaiah Amir Mustafa narrate in an app to facilitate in-person play.
Among Us is really just a continuation along this series of games -- except you actually have to go around a 2D map and complete toy tasks to accomplish a goal. If you're not into playing games, you can watch some folks on Twitch playing it to get a sense of how the dynamics work.
It takes some of the grief out of undesired outcomes - because you made the right decision based on the information you had, and chance just happened to not be in your favor in this case.
It affects how I make all kinds of business- and life-decisions. Chosing insurance-package on the rental car, investing in stock, trusting people etc.
FWIW Insurance is a negative expected value "asset", but it makes sense to buy it (not in this case necessarily). A one time massive negative hit to your finances could be devastating compared to periodic insurance payments. Expected value is a simplified representation of the distribution of outcomes which is really what you should be thinking about regarding risk management.
So it is really about what kind of deductible you will have vs. what you pay for it.
If I save 100 EUR 10 times renting a car and I expect to have one damage costing me 1000 EUR every 10 times I rent a car - it is neutral EV.
If you can't afford the "hit" of a large deductible if an accident happes, then it would make sense to pay more here and now to reduce or eliminate that risk.
I have saved thousands of euros over the years by electing to go with the included insurance, which typically is around 1000-1500EUR deductible, if I remember correctly.
So if I crash my rental car the next three times I rent a car and have to pay 3x1000EUR deductible, I will still be in the green.
Last time I picked an upgraded insurace, it was because we were a group that rented together, and I didn't want to risk friendsships over who might have dented the car etc. :)
The idea was you had up to 8 marines and 1 was a zergling, stick together until the timer runs out to win.
Fun times. I miss those days.
Even professional poker players can get cheated out of a lot of money in a private game.[1]
It's even easier to cheat amateurs.
There are all sorts of methods cheats can employ, from having accomplices[2] to using marked decks[3] or other cheating paraphernalia about which most amateur players are absolutely clueless.
Cheating online is even easier... if you're the one running the poker servers. Online poker is like online voting. It's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63jgfmgqkO0
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cnQlz0ZHG4
[3] - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=marked+decks
