Well don't just leave us hanging.

I made a post and then decided discretion was the better part of valor and deleted it. Maybe if WN says it is ok.

This thread is supposed to help us become better profilers though.

For now, lets just say having no other information you probably want to be at a table with a few drunk Korean businessman; and you probably dont want to be at a table with a few serious looking Vietnamese guys with jade Buddha statue card protectors.

Racist ban. Tricked you.

I don't have a racist bone in my body, but sometimes when I sit down at the poker table I will find myself thinking "hey that guy looks half-black, half-Chinese - I bet he has a pair of fours" but that is just thinking. As long as it doesn't change the way you play your hand, it isn't racist imo.

So you can’t win at online poker then? Actually I think some people are way over emphasizing these factors in this thread FWIW. I think careful and paying close attention to each hand played while at the table dwarfs these factors. It is pretty obvious that someone is a nit for example.

Scandinavian poker player's are very aggressive!!
There, I'm a racist

You won't get the same reaction to 8 as you do to 4. Multiples have nothing to do with it.

From what I understand, the character for "4" is similar to the character for "death" - thus bad mojo.

"8" is a lucky number to Chinese, so while "44" is "death death", "88" is "lucky lucky".

Maybe bet 4 8 then. Pretty much go die.

In absence of any information I definitely think some stereotypes hold true more often than not. Middle aged Asian guys that aren’t rich seem to be conservative and be concerned with preserving winnings after double/triple up. (If they don’t fit this stereotype, it would be obvious very quickly.)

Some groups tend to think more in terms of not wanting to lose the pot than maximizing EV. That makes them more prone to getting sticky with made hands they aren’t happy with and more prone to making spazzy bluffs that don’t make much sense.

Stereotypes really aren’t useful after a couple orbits though. You should have better info to go with by then unless you just aren’t paying attention.

Are you telling me that I want to be a table with drunk guys? Are you sure about that?

WN posts the only sensible thing in this entire thread, and it is completely ignored. That sounds about right.

Sure if the goal is to maximize profit, not so much if the goal is maximize fun.

Don't care if it's racist, but LMAO at "BigBuffBlackManBluff" as a moniker

I just hope that everyone realizes that the above statement is flawed. If two thirds of green coins are weighted 70-30 heads, while other coins are 50-50, a green coin that came up heads 5 out of ten flips has an EV of at least 51 heads out of its next 100 flips. In other words the two orbits might give you "better info" but not to the point where the original info should be ignored.

So check call against black guys then David?

The reason why grizy is right is that the kinds of stereotypes being employed here are nowhere close to being as accurate as "two thirds of green coins are weighted 70-30 heads," nor is it ever the case (in the analogy) that "the others are 50-50." That's kind of the point of calling them stereotypes.

Grizy (and you) are wrong. Period. If you go by his premise that for the first few hands stereotypes might be useful, then it will always have a (diminishing) effect on your conclusion later on regardless of the strength of the statistical information that follows. That fact has nothing to do with the accuracy of the sample statistics I mentioned.

I understand that you need to believe that my purely mathematical correction was posted with the ulterior motive of justifying racism. Because if there actually existed a large group of people who are both non racist and don't make silly thinking errors, it would diminish the relevance of non racists who couldn't figure out that dealing it twice doesn't change EV.

David,

I think the point is that a stereotype may have a vanishingly small value as an input to a predictive model after a few orbits, even if the stereotype is grounded in reality.

To take an extreme example, let's suppose that an octogenarian sits down at my table. He is wearing a pin that says "Proud Member of AAA" and he is carrying a book titled "Living the Golden Years on a Fixed Income". Let's assume also that we have rock solid statistical proof that 95% of the players with his profile 3-bet preflop only with QQ+.

He then proceeds to 3-bet flop in 15 of the first 18 hands. We obviously should assign virtually no weight to the stereotype when he 3-bets preflop in hand 19.

Put another way, by hand 19, the chances that we have run into a player that does not adhere to stereotype drastically outstrip the chances that we have run into a player that was dealt QQ+ in 15 of the first 18 hands.

If you want to be nitty about it, yeah, in some truly edge situations I might be like "this dude is Asian ex-banker. He's more likely to push with a flush draw than someone otherwise identical."

Yeah, I do that. But really there are better things to spend my brain power/attention on before I get to that point.

Seems like actually going through the math would help your argument.

Saying the heuristic isn’t useful clearly isn’t intended to claim that it would in a theoretical framework be worth nil. You’re being pedantic.

If you crunched the numbers and it turned out hispanics were 5% more likely to raise the river as a bluff, it’s not even really necessarily theoretically sound to adjust other reads by that 5% unless you think that the driver of that 5% difference is independent of other info gathered.

Ie: if Hispanic’s skew younger significantly, and younger people bluff raise more in a similar proportion to what their demographics would imply, if you add the 5% in addition to whatever figure you’re adjusting for age there’s a good chance you’re double counting and overestimating the increased frequency of bluff raises.

If you thought there was some quality in hispanics that was independent of all other variables you’re taking notice of then yes, the residual would exist. But no matter whether you think that residual exists, a lot of your initial race-based read will be eaten up by other info. And I can’t imagine anyone thinking the difference is large to begin with which is why saying that it stops being useful is a pretty fair statement.

if anyone thinks they do have strong race based reads though, again I’ll say, make a specific prediction and we can find a way to bet on it.

White guys presume to know everything and think they can read your soul just by looking at you. In particular, they think you are not as smart as they are and may assume you are a bit out of line. As a result, they will tend to pay off your big hands, especially if you overbet the pot.

For real. There is a bulgarian regular in my games who sounds kinda russian. He is a super strong player and actually plays pretty tight ranges but he gets paid off constantly because people assume he's a maniac because of his accent.