Category: Poker

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Quantized Poker?

I like poker and I like quantum computing and lo and behold here is a paper with both:

arXiv: 0902.2196
Title: Quantized Poker
Authors: Steven A. Bleiler
Poker has become a popular pastime all over the world. At any given moment one can find tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of players playing poker via their computers on the major on-line gaming sites. Indeed, according to the Vancouver, B.C. based pokerpulse.com estimates, more than 190 million US dollars daily is bet in on-line poker rooms. But communication and computation are changing as the relentless application of Moore’s Law brings computation and information into the quantum realm. The quantum theory of games concerns the behavior of classical games when played in the coming quantum computing environment or when played with quantum information. In almost all cases, the “quantized” versions of these games afford many new strategic options to the players. The study of so-called quantum games is quite new, arising from a seminal paper of D. Meyer cite{Meyer} published in Physics Review Letters in 1999. The ensuing near decade has seen an explosion of contributions and controversy over what exactly a quantized game really is and if there is indeed anything new for game theory. With the settling of some of these controversies cite{Bleiler}, it is now possible to fully analyze some of the basic endgame models from the game theory of Poker and predict with confidence just how the optimal play of Poker will change when played in the coming quantum computation environment. The analysis here shows that for certain players, “entangled” poker will allow results that outperform those available to players “in real life”.

Steven?

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The Casinos Must Love This….Or Do They Hate It?

A New York Times article on computers playing poker heads up against humans opens with

For anyone stuck on a casino stool, playing hours of video poker, rest assured: humans can still beat a computer.

Um, well first of all, video poker is quite different from the heads up Texas Holdem the entire article is about. Significatly different from an artificial intelligence standpoint. Second, as far as I know, video poker machines have payoffs for an optimal strategy which are usually right around equal payoff and hourly wages you’d get from playing this strategy are pretty pathetic even for the machines with greater than even payoff. Since the majority of players are probably far from an optimal strategy, I’d guess video poker is quite the cash cow for the casinos.
But I wonder, when computers finally are able to beat humans at a poker (okay, some will say, “never!” I will say, you’re allowed to say “never” when you can run a thousand body simulation of a star cluster in your head. Reverse Turing Shazam!) whether this will actually hurt video poker machines. Hm, well seeing how they casinos still seem to rack in the mullah with their slot machines, probably not.

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The Physics of "All-In"?

Combining two excellent topics, physics and poker, physics/0703122:

Universal statistical properties of poker tournaments
Authors: Clément Sire
We present a simple model of Texas hold’em poker tournaments which contains the two main aspects of the game: i. the minimal bet is the blind, which grows exponentially with time; ii. players have a finite probability to go “all-in”, hence betting all their chips. The distribution of the number of chips of players not yet eliminated (measured in units of its average) is found to be independent of time during most of the tournament, and reproduces accurately Internet poker tournaments data. This model makes the connection between poker tournaments and the persistence problem widely studied in physics, as well as some recent physical models of biological evolution or competing agents, and extreme value statistics which arises in many physical contexts.

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A New Path to Research

Steve sends me a link to a Seed magazine article about The Poker Playing Physicist. No word on whether he will continue in poker or retire to a life of physics research.

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Ben and Ami Are Famous!

You may have noticed that this blog has become all poker all the time. Well get ready for even more. Here is a link to an ABC World News story about my friends Ben and Ami Foster. Cool! Ben, you remember is the guy who gave up a job at eBay to play poker online professionally. Cool shot of Ben’s setup playing eight poker tables at a time. Even cooler shot of his tracking his success staistically. When I was little I used to take two dice and role them over and over and keep track of the statistics and plot them up all pretty. Yeah, it was a repressed childhood.
Ben and Ami now have got me beat. My closest approach to such stardome on national TV was on CNN where I was a token Caltech student fawning over Feynman. Luckily the video isn’t online to embarrass me.

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Million $ Final Table

The 2006 world series of poker is down to its final table of nine. The field was so big this year (over eight thousand people!) that every single one of the players at the final table will receive over a million dollars. The payouts are

1st – $12,000,000
2nd – $6,102,499
3rd – $4,123,310
4th – $3,628,513
5th – $3,216,182
6th – $2,803,851
7th – $2,391,520
8th – $1,979,189
9th – $1,566,858

Yowzer! Among the players at the final table is a theoretical physicist:

Michael Binger
This 29-year-old Atherton, Calif. resident describes himself as a professional poker player and part-time theoretical physicist – he earned a PhD in theoretical particle physics from Stanford earlier this year. Binger has been playing poker for six years, and this marks the second year he has played in the World Series of Poker. In addition to making the final table of the Main Event, he made the final table of a $1,500 buy-in event earlier in the tournament and won $100,000. Chip count: $3,140,000.

Damn, professional poker play and part-time theoretical physicist, now thats a job description!
Update: Binger has come in an amazing third place. Amazing because he started out a very very short stack! Congrats to Binger, he done make us theoretical physicists proud. The winner was Jamie Gold who had a commanding lead through the final table.