Looks interesting... know anything about this book?

The Poker Face of Wall Street by Aaron Brown, with a foreword by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

that sounds funny:against two future nobel prize winners...how do you know?

I guess they won it years after they played.

I seem to remember a thread on this on this very forum. I hope they credit me for all my invaluable insight on that thread. Exec Director eh?

We've been through some permutations on Nobel Prize winner counting.Universities have the same problem. Some count every Nobel prize winner ever affiliated with the University in any capacity (some count even more). Harvard always emphasized Nobel prize winners currently teaching at the school. Yale preferred to list people teaching at Yale at the time they got the award. University of Chicago is proud of being the place where the more researchers did the work that won the prizes. Of course, the total number of claimed Nobel Prize winners considerably exceeds the total number of prizes given out.I have played with one person who had the prize at the time I played him, and two who subsequently won Nobel prizes. There are some good candidates remaining, I might get my count up to six or more over the next ten years, even if I don't play.I don't consider a major point of distinction. Most American men play poker and if you wanted to get a double digit count of Nobel prize winners, it wouldn't be hard if you devoted serious attention to the matter. It would be easier if you were a bad player than a good one. But the Wiley publicity people seized on the statistic as a good way to spin the book as both smart and cool. They were disappointed that I couldn't list ten BSD traders that I had partied with, this was the next-best thing.

On my wish list...I am looking forward to reading the book, Aaron!!!

If we apply Aaron's point about the different metric used by universities for Nobel winners, then to what extent does he feel that people who won the prize after playing increased their chances of a win ?

QuoteOriginally posted by: DCFCIf we apply Aaron's point about the different metric used by universities for Nobel winners, then to what extent does he feel that people who won the prize after playing increased their chances of a win ?Winning the prize or winning money in the game?If the achievement means anything at all, you should count the people you played before they did their Nobel-prize work. That's hard to do (you have to find smart people before everyone else figures it out) and conceivably could allow you to claim some small share of their accomplishment.I don't regard Nobel-prize counts as something to be sought, but as a convenient measure of something broader. A university that supported lots of people doing Nobel-prize research, probably supports a lot of smart, productive people. Not that the prize-winners are necessarily smarter or more productive than other top researchers, but they're easier to measure. I wouldn't respect a university that set out to garner a lot of Nobel prizes or other awards (as Texas arguably did in the late 1970s; or as Harvard is apt to do after the fact). But a good university will naturally accumulate a respectable number of awards.Similarly, if you play poker with a lot of smart people, some of them may go on to win Nobel prizes. Those people aren't necessarily the smartest ones, but they're easy to count.

any chance of putting up a chapter on web on this book

I have been shamefully remiss in the website. I've tinkered with it for months, but haven't activated it. But I promise to get it up soon.

QuoteOriginally posted by: skphangknow anything about this book?Yeah, Aaron's a great writer who I always hoped would write a book. And I can't think of a better title for a book in 2005 from a marketing standpoint. But a look at the Amazon link suggests it's more of a history book than a poker book. Aaron has probably been pretty quick to brainstorm a chapter's worth of provocative comparisons between risk management on Wall Street, and something in poker. But I'm not sure how thoughtful he has actually been about the game of poker itself. A year or two ago I started noticing Aaron paraphrasing quotes from the first few pages of 2+2 books, like it was the first time he had read them.QuoteOriginally posted by: Aaron Brown (Wed Nov 26, 03)Over a year or more the volatility averages out near 1% per day, but on shorter intervals it deviates significantly. Someone who knew the true model parameters could take all money money trading even vanilla options.This dramatic characterization of someone with an edge as being able to "take all your money" can be traced through Sklansky back to Bob Stupak. Stupak said something like "given 1/10th of a percent the best of it, and if he plays long enough, that 1/10th of a percent will bust the world's richest man." I think after quoting Stupak, Sklanksy uses something almost identical to Aaron's phrase in his own writing. Before the Internet enabled beginners to play 10,000 hands of poker, it was hard for them to have confidence in "expectation," or to stick to a strategy that would give them an edge, in the face of short-term swings. A lot of Sklansky's value was to convince beginners to avoid the temptations a short epoch of playing experience would encourage, and to instead be patient.QuoteOriginally posted by: Aaron Brown (July 21, 2004)One of the reasons holdem poker is popular is the actions of the players do not affect the order of the deal. This means you can know exactly "what would have happened" after the hand Again, I think Sklansky points this out to warn against the temptation of beginners to deviate from correct strategy, in this case his starting-hand tables. Sklanksy says "A unique aspect of hold'em is that hands you don't play can sometimes be frustrating because the board is always the same whether you play or not." (Hold'em Poker for Advanced Players, p. 13) When two-seven hits the board, and you see that if you had called your two-seven you would have made a huge pot, it can become tempting. But I think rather than connecting these two phrases - saying this unchanged order is why hold'em is popular - Sklansky simply mentions it in or near a discussion of which poker games are popular. It is at least a few paragraphs away that Sklanksy says something like hold'em used to be a "profitable game for pros because of the large number of people who think any two cards can win." What struck me about Aaron's quote is that I don't think he would have said it unless he was just parroting. It's really kind of inane and insignificant, so that if Aaron had invented and considered this idea during his own contemplation - rather than by mix-and-match parroting - I don't think he would have deemed it worth saying. He might have thought this unique characteristic of hold'em was interesting enough to be worth mentioning in some discussion somewhere, but using it in this way is a little contrived.QuoteOriginally posted by: Aaron Brown (Sep 25, 03)QuoteOriginally posted by: RookieQuantI am wondering if there is a way to find the optimal bet given the probability that your hand is the best at the table, i.e should you bet the max every time you have better than 50% or should you only bet the max when you are a 75% favorite?All major games have enough choice to make the unconditional probabilities almost meaningless. That's why good poker players are good at all poker games, and typically do not excel at academic mathematics, statistics or game theory.It must have been in the context of the above quote from two months later, and several other things Aaron said, that this recognition of conditional probability and situational rules sounded to me like a man who had just read Sklansky for the first time. Again, this is a cut-and-paste of phrases which Sklansky wrote in close proximity. Sklansky says "Beginning players sometimes ask 'What do you do in this particular situation?' There really is no correct answer to that question because it's the wrong question. Rules of thumb that say to fold one hand, call with another, and raise with yet another simply won't get a player beyond the beginning stages. The right question is: 'What do you consider in this particular situation before determining what to do?'" (The Theory of Poker, p. xi) I think Aaron hit it more closely in another post, but the other Sklansky quote which comes to mind is "Paradoxically, the two types of players who favor these exotic poker variations are generally amateurs who want a lot of action and hustlers who prey on these amateurs because their long experience alows them to adjust more easily to unusual games than their amateur opponents can. However, before a player can become an expert at exotic games, he must understand the basic concepts of standard games." (The Theory of Poker, p. 3) Or maybe "there is an inner logic that runs through all of them, and there are general precepts, concepts, and theories that apply to all" varieties of poker. (The Theory of Poker, p. 5)QuoteOriginally posted by: Aaron Brown (August 26, 04)I preferred games where staying sober was enough to guarantee at least break-even, and getting invited back next week was the goal rather than winning money as fast as possible...My experience in Poker is that it is important to give people the kind of game they want. It's easy to win at social poker games by playing very conservatively, but that's not much fun for anyone. This sounds exactly like something around page 260 of The Theory of Poker, I think. But I've used my maximum allowed page searches on Amazon.If I am correct, and Aaron just got into the mainstream of poker theory in 2003, then the short time to coming up with enough things to say to write his own book is pretty impressive. I spent a lot of time on twoplustwo.com up until around 2003, and even some later - including just looking to see how the probability forum was doing - and I never saw Aaron there.

Wow! I'm flattered that you're writing your PhD dissertation tracing the subtle influences on my work. Actually, this is probably was PhD dissertations will look like in twenty years, when everyone has a long history of Internet usage to search with intelligent bots.If you're saying you don't think I'm a good enough, or at least serious enough, poker player to write a book with "poker" in the title, there's only one way to settle that. I think you know what it is.I first read Malmuth, and found Sklanksy only later. I think that was in the mid to late 1990s. Another book in a similar vein I found around the same time is Peter Steiner's Thursday Night Poker (the same guy who wrote the economics textbook). This was indeed my first exposure to modern poker theory. Earlier theoretical works were heavily mathematical, more concerned with proving points about combinatorics and game theory than helping anyone play; what passed for poker theory was just distilled experience saddled with fancy justifications.When researching my book, I discovered many new (to me) authors and rediscovered many old ones. I also went back and read more books from authors whom I knew through their most famous books. I think that's what you're picking up in 2002 and 2003. I was working on the book, and therefore reading a lot of poker theory, which might have crept into my posts. Some of the parallels are weaker than others, however, and even the stronger ones may be indirect. Perhaps Sklansky and I saw the same movie, or read the same novel, or had the same news event in the backs of our minds.

I think you're highly qualified to write the book you wrote. And to the extent that you are uniquely qualified, you had a moral obligation to write it before your knowledge gets lost in a plane crash or something.I just tire of the cliched comparison of poker to Wall Street, which the title of your book will certainly perpetuate regardless of the content. I wrote an essay about some flaws in this comparison, maybe I'll look for it.I also disagree with the notion that laymen, or people with lives or careers in other areas, have much to say about poker. It is because they think they do, that people who play poker 80 hours a week can take their money.Even Andy Beal, who more than anyone thinks a smart person can beat the full-time pros, said "I had a great time and a wonderful experience, but I have little interest in continuing to play the game, because of the time commitment and travel required to maintain excellence."You are a very gifted person in some area. One characteristic of this is being slightly gifted in a lot of areas, and a lot of nearby areas. But I doubt that you were born to either teach, understand, or play the game of poker.

I largely agree with you, but I don't think poker is a sport, and therefore, I don't think the highest goal is to beat other people. Beating people is how you get famous in poker (self-promotion doesn't hurt either), but it's not the point of the game. I discuss in my book some special niches and subcultures in which beating people in poker is important, it is no surprise that many top tournament players come from these settings.For most successful people, there is more cooperation than competition at a poker table, and that story has yet to be published.