Finally I went and got the supervisor. When he came over, the dealer explained the situation. He seemed to accept Levitt’s explanation.
Then he looked at me. “Did you want the card?” he asked, meaning the two that Levitt drew.
“Well, now that I see it, sure I want it,” I said. I had seventeen; I certainly wouldn’t have hit on seventeen, but a two would give me a lovely nineteen.
“Here,” he said, and gave me the two. “Happy New Year.”
Then the dealer took a card and busted.
I don’t know much about gambling, but I do know that the next time I’m in Vegas and feel compelled to play some blackjack, I’m going to Caesars.
And just so you don’t think that Levitt really is a complete gambling idiot: the next day, we sat down at the sports book and he grabbed a Daily Racing Form and studied it for about ten minutes and then went up and placed a bet. He found a horse, going off at 7–2, that had never run a race. But he saw something that he liked. He bet the horse to win and win only. And then we watched the race on one of the jumbo screens. It took a good sixty seconds for his horse to settle into the gate—we thought it would be scratched—but then it got in and the gates opened and his horse led wire to wire. It was a good bit more impressive than his blackjack.
A FEW MONTHS LATER . . .
World Series of Poker Update: Levitt Ties Record That Can Never Be Broken
(SDL)
I recently went to Vegas to play in my first World Series of Poker event. The game was no-limit hold ’em. Each player started with five thousand chips.
So what record did I tie? The record for the least number of pots won by a player in a WSOP event: zero. I played for almost two hours and did not win a single hand. I didn’t even manage to steal the blinds once. Despite promising Phil Gordon seconds before the tournament that I would not let ace-queen be my undoing, I lost two big pots with those hole cards. (Both times an ace came up on the flop; neither time did the opponent have an ace; both times I still lost.) I probably played them wrong both times.
The beauty of the WSOP is that there is always another event the next day. Maybe I’ll give it another try tomorrow—there’s nowhere to go but up.
THE NEXT DAY . . .
One Card Away from the Final Table at the World Series of Poker
(SDL)
What a difference a day makes.
I blogged yesterday about my first foray into World Series of Poker action. It started and ended very badly, with me failing to win a single hand.
Who knows why I signed up for another day of punishment at the hands of the poker pros the very next day. The structure of this tournament was different: a shootout. That means that the ten players at a table play until one has all the chips. Then that player moves on to the next round. After two rounds of this, the field of nine hundred is whittled down to nine players who make the final table.
My pessimism was only enhanced when I discovered that David “the Dragon” Pham had been seated next to me. He has won over $5 million in poker tournaments, has two WSOP bracelets, and was the defending champion in this very event! My table of ten had at least five full-time poker professionals.
Amazingly, after some good luck, I emerged the winner five hours later.
I needed to win one more table to make it to the final table, which would provide me bragging rights for life. I was lucky to have lunch with Phil Gordon, probably the best poker teacher in the world. He explained something to me over lunch that is fundamental to good poker, and probably somewhat obvious, but I had never understood it. (It’s too valuable an insight to give away for free here; you’ll have to buy one of Phil’s books.)
The combination of that insight and a lot of good cards had me rolling at the second table. Unfortunately, I had to knock out my friend Brandon Adams, one of the very best poker players in the world and a great writer as well. Brandon is a classic example of opportunity cost . . . he makes so much money playing poker that he will likely never finish his economics Ph.D. at Harvard.
I found myself with a chip lead as the table was reduced to just me and one opponent, Thomas Fuller. I built my lead up to about 2–1 after forty-five minutes. Then I lost a bunch when I had ace-king suited and probably played it completely wrong. That made our chip stacks about even.
Not long after was the hand that undid me. Fuller made a standard raise pre-flop. I called with king-seven. The flop came king-queen-eight, all of different suits. I bet 7,200 chips and he called. The turn card was a seven. There were now two clubs on the board. I checked, hoping he would raise me and then I could re-raise him. That is exactly what happened. He bet eight thousand and I re-raised.
Much to my surprise, he then re-raised me. What could he have? I was hoping he had a queen. But maybe he had K10, KJ, K8, AK, or even two pair. Still, I forged ahead. I re-raised him again. Then he pushed all-in! I figured I was beaten, but I called his all-in raise. I was stunned when he turned over a six and a nine. All he had was a straight draw. He was bluffing. There were only eight cards in the deck that would make him a winner. I had an 82 percent chance of winning that hand. If I won that hand, I had over 90 percent of the chips, and was virtually certain to make the final table. A five came on the river, he hit his straight, and the Cinderella story had come to an end. I was out.
I have to say, though, that even as antisocial as I am, I really enjoyed the ride. It was one of the best gambling experiences I’ve ever had. The morning after, however, I feel like I have a terrible hangover, despite the fact that I didn’t have a drop of alcohol. I know myself well enough to know exactly what that hangover is all about. Like any “good” gambler, I don’t care very much whether I win or lose, as long as there is more gambling action on the horizon. But when the gambling is over, the crash comes.
Today is the crash for me. No more WSOP. No more gambling for a while. “Just” a family trip to the Hoover Dam and a long plane ride back to Chicago.
And maybe a little teeny pick-six ticket at Hollywood Park.
Why Isn’t Backgammon More Popular?
(SJD)
I’ve mentioned in the past that I love backgammon. A reader recently wrote to ask whether Levitt and I ever play and, more important, why a game as great as backgammon isn’t more popular.
Sadly, Levitt and I have never played. But it’s the second part of the question that got me thinking. Why not indeed? Off the top of my head, I’d say:
• Well, it’s not so unpopular, and there are those who say a renaissance is perhaps under way. My friend James Altucher and I have a running game (101-point matches) that we usually play in diners or restaurants, and almost inevitably a small crowd (or at least the server) will hang out to watch and talk about the game . . .
• That said, yes, it’s a fringe game. Why? I’d say it’s because too many people play it without gambling, or at least without using the doubling cube. Without the cube, a game that can be intricate and strategic can too easily become a boring dice race. Once you use the cube, especially with dollars attached to points, the game changes completely because the most exciting and difficult decisions have to do more with cube play than with checker play.
• Why is the game itself too often uninteresting? Don’t get me wrong: I love playing backgammon. But the fact is that the choice set of moves is in fact quite small. That is, for many rolls, there’s clearly one optimal move, or perhaps two that are nearly equal. So once you know those moves, the game is limited, and you need some stakes to make it interesting. Unlike, say, chess, where the options and strategies are far more diverse.
This last point, if arguable, got me to wondering: In what percent of backgammon turns would there seem to be clearly one optimal move—versus, for comparison, chess?
Since James is a superb chess player and also an excellent backgammon player (and a smart guy in general), I asked him. His answer is well worth sharing:
It’s an interesting question. Let’s define optimal first.
Let’s s
ay a program has an evaluation function (EV). Given a position, the EV returns a number from one to ten based on how good the position is for the person whose move it is. If it’s a ten, the person with the move wants to get to that position. The EV is a function of various heuristics added up (how many people are on the center, how many pips I’m ahead in the race, how many slots I control, how many loose pieces I have, etc.). When it’s my turn, the computer looks at all my initial moves and finds the ones resulting in the best EV. It then looks at all my opponent’s responses to each move and finds the ones resulting in the lowest EV for me (this now propagates up to become the EV of my initial move). It then looks at all my responses to my opponent’s responses and finds the ones with the best EV (and does the propagation again). This is called min-max. Looking at all the best moves only is called alpha-beta search and is how most game programs work.
So the question is, what is “optimal”? On a scale of one to ten, if a move is three better than the next move, is that optimal? Let’s say it is.
In chess, it’s easy to see optimal moves. If someone does rook takes queen, then hopefully I can take his queen and it’s a fair trade. By far that will be the only optimal move. Other optimal moves lead to checkmate or great increases in material. Otherwise, it’s probably not optimal. In a typical chess game, maybe 5 percent of the moves have a value greater than “one pawn’s worth.”
In backgammon, I’d say it’s 10 percent. I’m saying this based on experience with Backgammon NJ [an excellent program, BTW], discussions with backgammon game programmers in the past, and I’m using 10 percent rather than 5 percent because backgammon is slightly less complex than chess. It’s not simple, though. To be a backgammon master probably requires almost as much study but not quite.
Hope this was helpful.
Yes, James, helpful indeed—because I now know a bit better how you think about the game, which I desperately need to finally beat you in our 101-point matches. Thanks!
What Are My Chances of Making the Champions Tour (or at Least Hitting the Golf Ball Really Far)?
(SDL)
Despite the fact that I am not very good at golf, my secret fantasy is to someday play on the Champions Tour, the professional golf tour for fifty-somethings. As I approach my forty-fourth birthday, I realize it is time to get serious in this endeavor.
The right way to spend my time if I really wanted to make the tour, I suppose, would be to practice more. My friend Anders Ericsson popularized the magic number of ten thousand hours of practice to become an expert. Depending on exactly what you count as practice, by my rough calculations I have logged about five thousand hours of golf practice over the course of my life. Given how mediocre I am after the first five thousand hours, however, I’m not so optimistic that the next five thousand hours will lead me anywhere good.
So instead, I spent some time today figuring out how just how much I will need to improve. The best PGA Tour pros tend not to have regular handicaps, but are said to be the equivalent of Plus 8 on the handicap scale—i.e., eight strokes better than a scratch golfer. I claim to be a six handicap. That means that, to a first approximation, if I played eighteen holes today against the best players in the world, I should lose by fourteen strokes.
The probability that I will improve by fourteen strokes in the next six years is easy to estimate: zero.
Fortunately, my goal isn’t to be the best golfer in the world, just to be the worst golfer on the Champions Tour. Surely, that can’t be so hard, can it?
So I set out to measure just how much worse that guy is than the world’s very best golfers. A direct comparison is hard to make because the bottom feeders on the Champions Tour rarely play against the Tiger Woodses of the world. The stars of the Champions Tour do, however, play an occasional PGA Tour event. I was able to find nineteen players who competed on both tours in 2010. On average, these players had a stroke average of 70.54 when playing on the Champions Tour, compared to an average of 71.77 when they played PGA Tour events. This suggests that the typical Champions Tour course plays a little more than one stroke easier than the typical PGA Tour course.
The top players on the PGA Tour post average scores of a little below seventy strokes per round, meaning that the upper echelon of senior golfers is about two strokes worse per round than the best players in the world. The low performers on the Champions Tour score around seventy-three on Champions Tour courses, or about two and a half strokes worse than the top senior golfers. If the world’s best golfers are Plus 8 handicappers, then that means the “bad” golfers on the senior tour are roughly Plus 3 or Plus 4.
That’s “only” nine or ten strokes a round better than me. Surely I can close that gap! If I can squeeze merely one stroke of improvement out of each incremental five hundred hours of practice, then by the time I hit ten thousand hours, I will be a Plus 4.
With that goal in mind, I recently started taking golf lessons for the first time since I was thirteen years old. One reason I chose my new golf coach, Pat Goss, is that he was an undergraduate economics major at Northwestern. I thought maybe he would understand the way I think.
On our first meeting, Pat first told me I swing like a character out of Caddyshack, and then asked me about my golf goals.
I responded with 100 percent honesty: “I want to play on the Champions Tour. But if you decide I’ll never be that good, then I have a very different objective. I don’t care the slightest bit about what my handicap ends up being in that case. All that matters to me then is being able to hit the ball as far as possible, even if I can’t break a hundred.”
I guess he’s not used to getting an honest answer to this question, because he was so overcome with laughter he practically fell to the ground.
The good news is that six lessons later we are still devoting time to perfecting my short game, suggesting he thinks I can achieve my dream of making the tour.
Or maybe he’s just maximizing revenue. After all, he is an economist by training.
10,000 Hours Later: The PGA Tour?
(SDL)
Last spring, I jokingly (okay, maybe half jokingly) wrote about my quest to make the Champions Tour, the professional golf tour for people over the age of fifty. In that post, I made reference to the ideas of Anders Ericsson, who argues that with ten thousand hours of the right kind of deliberate practice, more or less anyone can become more or less world class at anything. I’ve spent five thousand hours practicing golf, so if I could just find the time for five thousand more, I should be able to compete with the pros. Or at least that is what the theory says. My scorecards seem to be telling a different story!
It turns out I’ve got a kindred spirit in this pursuit, only this guy is dead serious. A few years back, twenty-something Dan McLaughlin decided he wanted to play on the PGA Tour. Never mind that he had only played golf once or twice in his life and had done quite poorly those times. He knew the 10,000-hour argument, and he thought it would be fun to give it a test. So he quit his job, found a golf coach, and has devoted his life to golf ever since. So far he is 2,500 hours into his 10,000-hour quest, which he chronicles at thedanplan.com.*
A while back I happened to find myself at Bandon Dunes, the golfers’ haven on the Oregon coast. I met Dan there, and we had the chance to play thirty-six holes together. We had a great time, and it was fascinating to get to know him and hear about his approach.
The golf pro who has been guiding him had a very unusual plan, to say the least. For the first six months of Dan’s golfing life, he was only allowed to putt. We are literally talking about Dan standing on a putting green for six to eight hours a day, six or seven days a week, hitting one putt after another. That is nearly one thousand hours of putting before he ever touched another club. Then he was given a wedge. He used just the wedge and the putter for another few months, before he got an eight iron. It wasn’t until a year and a half into his golfing life—two thousand hours of practice—that he hit a driver for the first time.
I understand the basic
logic of starting close to the hole (most shots in golf, after all, do occur close to the hole), but to my economist’s mind, this sounds like a very bad strategy for at least two reasons.
First, one of the most basic tenets of economics is what we call diminishing marginal returns. The first little bit of something yields big returns; the more you do of something, the less valuable it is. For example, the first ice cream cone is delicious. The fourth is nauseating. The same must be true of putting. The first half hour is fun and engaging. By the eighth straight hour, it must be mind-numbing. I just can’t imagine a person could focus that single-mindedly on putting, not just one day, but for months and months on end.
Second, my own experience suggests that there are spillovers across different aspects of golf. Things you feel when chipping help inform the full swing. Sometimes I can feel what I should be doing with a driver, and that helps me with my irons. Sometimes it is the opposite. To be putting and chipping for months without any idea what a full swing is—that just seems wrong to me.
So is the strategy working? After 2,500 hours, Dan is still really excited about golf, so that is a victory in and of itself. He is an eleven handicap, which means he is about fifteen to sixteen strokes per round away from being good enough for the PGA Tour. That means he has to shave off about one stroke for every five hundred hours of practice from here on out. I suspect he can keep that rate of improvement for the next few thousand hours, but it will be a tough haul after that.
Whatever the outcome, I’ll be rooting for him. Partly because he is a nice guy, and partly because he promised me free tickets to the 2016 U.S. Open, but only if he qualifies.
When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants Page 14