I would suggest that maybe CP doesn't do that.

**** the jackpot.

Come on, obviously I meant that playing the lottery is -EV for me, not that the jackpot would be -EV if I could somehow win it without betting with my own money.

Although, apparently many winners of big prizes say they wish they had never won.

http://time.com/4176128/powerball-ja...ttery-winners/

Assuming a 1% chance, I would still likely take all those bets. Again the $20 million is a mostly usable figure for me, and the $2 would not be a major expense. There is some point I wouldn't take take the bet despite the great odds though. I probably wouldn't spend $2000 for a 1% chance at winning $20 Billion. Definitely wouldn't wager higher amounts than that for a 1% chance of any win.

And lol, I just noticed that 2+2 censored my use of the word for the genus of human beings in a previous post.

CP has an amazingly low rake compared to the rest of the country.

I also support increasing promo drop as the promotions at cp are currently pathetic and better promotions may bring in more traffic.

Of course I play 40/80 mix primarily so the extra promo drop doesn't really affect me :P

Where do you think your threshold is? 0.1% chance of winning? 0.001% chance of winning? At this point I'm more just probing where your boundaries are for this kind of thing.

Fundamentally, the utility construct for modeling your behavior is not an effective one. Expected utility doesn't actually work very well because we compartmentalize information to bring certain pieces of information in and keep others out.

An example of this is myself getting just out of graduate school. I had built up a reasonable amount of bankroll. So while I would be fine showing up to the Mirage (at the time, there were games there) or Bellagio with a couple thousand dollars and would be willing to lose it, but I would buy the generic cereal at the grocery store to save a dollar. The money was "different" to me in both situations, and I valued it in different ways.

That's feels much more like risk aversion.

2+2 is anti-science.

Having played a few more sessions with this guy, he's a stiff and is just looking for an excuse every down. Just a wonderful human

I won't deny having some risk aversion, but I really think that example is more due to my declining utility function of huge amounts of money. $20 Billion isn't really worth significantly more to me than $20 Million, so that bet is really only effectively offering me 10,000 to 1 instead of 10,000,000 to 1.

I don't think your example of your own behavior was in any way irrational either. It's reasonable to be willing to spend money of "capital" (which gambling money with +EV is) while being frugal with regular expenditures. I'm the same way.

Even on a logarithmic scale, this really isn't a sensible claim. It may be true that each extra dollar may diminish in utility to you (diminishing marginal value/diminishing returns), but putting something like a hard ceiling on that is weird. I would also argue that thinking about it only in terms of what you might do for yourself is probably a very skewed way to look at the utility of the money.

In any event, it still reads to me as being artificial and not at all a reflection of how humans actually behave. Theories of expected utility show that humans make non-transitive decisions, which shows us that we don't actually act according to some consistent expected utility function.

Edit: Also, the Allais paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allais_paradox

I'm not claiming irrationality. I'm claiming that perceptual value of money is not fungible. Money has different values depending on the context. A dollar is not a dollar in all situations. This is part of why the utility argument fails.

I don't behave how most humans behave, especially with regards to money.

That's just laziness.

There are guides on how to claim the lottery anonymously, and you can avoid the external negatives (people hitting you up for money).

You can set up a trust (and if you claim anonymously you do this anyway) and you can choose exactly how to disburse the funds, thereby avoiding the internal negatives (blowing through money).

I am not kidding when I say that if you feel money would change you, you should create a blind trust whose mission would be to buy up your favorite poker room so that you can keep the rake at 10% to $3. And then to avoid getting tainted you can stipulate you don't get any of the money directly so you can continue grinding 8/16 for the rest of your life.

Money only changes you if you let it. I admit there's probably no way to go from "broke as ****" to "literal billionaire" without crashing and burning a little. But that's one of the reasons taking a reasonable amount of risk when you're poor is good. If I hadn't known the rush of a $20 blackjack gamble paying off when my daily gambling budget was $100, I would have had way more difficulty handling the sudden wealth when my top set of kings turned into the overfull house and I won a 35 BB pot at 80/160.

It's fine, and even beneficial, to take reasonable long shots (gambling or otherwise). It's good to ask someone out who's out of your league - and learn how to deal with rejection and occasional long shot success. It's good to take a little money and put it into an individual, small cap stock that you really like - and learn the true variance of the stock market. I mean obviously if you spend your life writing love letters to celebrities hoping they'll somehow fall in love with you, that's unreasonable. Or put all of your money in Callipygian Erectile Dysfunction Solutions: Putting the Small Cap Back in Small Cap Stocks, that's terrible. But you need to learn how to deal with those +2/-2 sigma swings in life before you can handle the +3/-3 sigma swings.

This may be true. I think the same is true for me.

But to deny observational facts about human behavior and to act as if this model that has clearly been shown to be false applies to you is absurd. The reality is that you don't have a functional utility calculation that you're actually doing and you're backwards justifying your conclusion on the basis of some abstract idea that you want to believe is true about you but isn't.

It's so much easier to be honest and say that you just have no interest in playing the lottery and not trying to erect some artificial utility function that you think you're calculating to determine that the lottery, in fact, is negative utility to you and that $20 billion is equivalent to $20 million. There is no utility function. There's just a gut emotional feeling that you experience when you think about the lottery.

Rob isn't alone in suggesting that at some point additional wealth has negative utility. Let's say that more wealth is no worse than breakeven through all amounts of additional wealth. I think that his argument is that investing 10x more money to win 10x more likely makes no sense -- so pay $20 for a lotto ticket instead of $2 for 10x prize. He's correct that having $200 million isn't really that much more utility for him than $20 million. It is just a result of diminishing marginal gains. I think that the argument that some $ figure has negative marginal utility isn't clear, but the concept isn't laughably crazy and has been suggested by actual economists.

So.... that's a weird website to support the argument. It's not something I would point to to support the argument because it's not well-written.

The conflation of "utility" and "happiness" is going to be a bit problematic in terms of this discussion. I'm not arguing that Bob will be "happier" with more money.

Against your website, I offer this analysis by an actual economist and not a high school economy teacher:

https://voxeu.org/article/maximising...ximise-welfare

And the underlying idea that there's a real utility calculus underneath the decision has also been pretty thoroughly challenged. If you really want to get into subjective expected utility as a theory of human behavior:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/d...ry-descriptive

In other words, we have studied the use of a type of personal expected utility as a way of modeling how people behave, and we know that it just doesn't work.

Edit: To clarify a bit, one can try to take the position that some sort or expected utility function represents how people *should* act (normative theory). That if we were to just figure out our utility functions, then we can determine "best" way to behave. But that's different from the claim that this is how we *do* act (descriptive theory).

I find the jackpot drop obnoxious because so much of it goes to promos which essentially only run during non-peak times, making it a tax on evening/weekend players.

Yes, I understand what you are getting at. I have read every behavioral economics book out there and am familiar with the current theories on how most people make most economic decisions, and I agree with them.

However, I am an economist by training and a professional gambler, and have made an effort my entire life to make financial decisions based as closely as I can to the ultra-rational. I'm not saying I'm perfectly there, but I am most closer than the vast majority of people who don't even have that as a goal. It still makes me a little nervous each time I put money into a poker pot, and a little sick each time I lose a pot or make any kind of bet that loses, but I overcome it and try to make the most +EV gambling decisions anyway.

When I was 18 the lottery was introduced in my home state - in fact, the very first election I had the chance to participate in was authorizing the state lottery, and I voted for it. I bought a ticket one time for the novelty value. Soon after I read about how it had such terrible payout odds, such that it was pretty much the worst bet one could ever make, so I decided not to bet on it again.

Many years later, when one of the jackpots had gotten so large that people were saying it was now likely a +EV bet, I considered buying a ticket again, but I realized that the amount of the jackpot was so huge that I could never enjoy spending it all. Therefore it wasn't really worth any more to me than the regular sized jackpots, so it was still effectively a bad bet. Of course I wasn't plotting my utility curves and measuring anything exactly, but this was the thought process I used. You can still choose to disbelieve me if you like.

It's pretty rare that more money could have negative utility, because it's quite easy to give money away. So unless it actually lowers your happiness to give something away, additional money can have at worst zero utility.

Apparently it reduced those people's happiness quite a bit to have people asking them to give it away. Though if I someday do decide to play again, and win, I will try to remember your advice about the anonymous trusts. And I'll hire you to run Callipygian's low-rake poker palace on the strip for me.

Under your rules of attempted ultra-rational behavior, it should be the case that you shouldn't have trouble with that.

Think about this one for a moment:

Who brings a half a million dollars to a strip club and expects things to go well for them?

Is it part of your personal philosophy that large wealth is the highest form of fulfillment?

There are reasons that those people got really unhappy with life when they had money. There's a lot to do with one's attitude towards/about the money and their behaviors with it. It could be a risk-aversion thing that you don't want to risk those potential outcomes.

But I still reject that it's ultimately a utility thing. I also reject that because you might not "enjoy" the money more that it has less "utility" for you. That goes back to the error of conflating utility and happiness.

I request that it be renamed Callipygian's House of Degen and referred to by its acronym, CHODE.

I really don't think I would have many of the problems that people in that article did, just always find those kinds of stories interesting.

I'm pretty bored with all this talk of +- ev of winning a metric ****-ton of money. I'd buy the company my son in law works for and give it to my daughter. I'd keep 20 million. The rest of it I'd probably piss away, maybe to some of you. Meh

What the flat earthers haven't answered is if you fail off the end of the earth where do you wind up? You fall off and then what?

https://www.livescience.com/62454-fl...an-effect.html

Duh.

I'd buy the old ladies' home and kick the old ladies out

I would buy a flat-earther a ticket to space

I'd probably have my address painted on the curb and then maybe buy some other things.