An oldie but goodie from Mental Floss:
The bus to Atlantic City is oversold, over-air-conditioned, and struggling to get out of Manhattan. Normally, I’d appreciate the irony that Greyhound dubs this shuttle the Lucky Streak, but right now I’m too busy sorting through my notes about implied odds, effective value, and something called “M-ratio.”
Two weeks ago, this pile of equations would have meant nothing to me. Today, however, it means next to nothing. A marginal improvement, sure, but isn’t massaging the margins what gambling is all about?
Poker Theory and Analytics is a graduate-level MIT course taught by Kevin Desmond, a former pro player and Morgan Stanley analyst. The school offers the course online, meaning video lectures, assignments, and class notes are available to anyone for free. Inspired by Bringing Down the House, the 2003 book about the MIT Blackjack Team who used their card-counting smarts to outwit Vegas, I formulated a simple plan: Take the class, hit the poker tables of Atlantic City, and profit.
The Jersey Turnpike, however, has a way of shaking one’s confidence.
I’m what seasoned poker players would call a “donkey.” I’ve played only small games with friends, and every hand I’ve ever won has been the result of pure luck (try as I might to convince myself otherwise). I lack every quality required of good poker players: risk assessment, pattern identification, stoicism, basic math proficiency, and attention span. If poker can be taught, as MIT’s course materials suggest, it’ll be put to the test here not by genius-level MIT students, but by a bumpkin who barely knows his multiplication tables.
But why would MIT offer a course on poker in the first place? According to its official overview, the class “takes a broad-based look at poker theory and applications of poker analytics to investment management and trading.” The bulk of the course consists of eight video lectures. One is guest-led by poker player, author, and financial risk manager Aaron Brown and covers the history of poker and how it relates to economics.
Poker is an American game (invented on the frontier in the early 1800s) with American sensibilities (the decidedly anti-monarchical bent that ranks the ace above the king). But what made it truly special was its use of chips—a novel idea at the time. These markers freely flowed between individuals, creating upstart economies complete with risk, debt, and credit, all in a time and place where actual currency was sparse and stagnant.
It makes sense, Brown asserts, that the first futures markets sprouted up in poker-crazy parts of the country, some two decades after the game first became popular. “Futures exchanges are populated by tough, brawling innovators who often make fortunes or lose fortunes,” Brown tells the class. Poker games are named after places that were populated by these types of people—Texas, Omaha, Chicago, etc. That’s why, he argues, “there is no poker game named after any place except places where, if you lose all your money in a game … you float down to New Orleans.”
This history is why the game once conjured images of Stetson-wearing toughs bluffing through cigarillo smoke. The rise of online poker means that today’s stereotype is less Maverick, more Mark Zuckerberg. Now, players can rapidly play through multiple tables and tournaments simultaneously, amassing years’ worth of experience in just a few days.
Students who took MIT’s course for credit (and not Internet observers watching later, like me) were asked to rack up hours in a private league created for the class by PokerStars, a major online gambling site (the students used fake money). They were granted free access to a poker tracker that enabled them to archive and tabulate their statistics. It was odd to see such product placement in a college class—both the online league and poker tracker were heavily branded—but I’d rather not clutch pearls when I’m learning how to better separate people from their money.
The course focuses on Texas Hold ’Em, a popular game you may have seen on ESPN’s annual World Series of Poker broadcast. While the goal is ostensibly to have the best combination of cards, it’s just as important to wear your poker face—either to convince everyone you have the best cards (and scare them out of betting against you), or the worst cards (and sucker them into betting against you).....
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