Hi Andrew thanks for the well. A couple of questions about betting while being freerolled:

Lets say for example you raise A-A-5-K rainbow in mid position and are called by two players behind you (blinds fold)

The flop is A-5-J

You bet and both players call, and you figure them for a likely low draw

Turn is an 8

Any player with a 2-3, 2-4, and 3-4, all likely lows, now have a freeroll for high. Whats our play here?

Theres other situations where this comes up where, if we keep betting we could potentially fold out a non-nut low and possibly scoop against a player who has a mediocre high and low hand and would fold to continued aggression.

Obviously if they knew we had no low in this case they should raise us at every opportunity but where do we apply balance between 'fear of being freerolled' and losing value from weaker high hands and/or folding out weak lows and scooping?

thanks

Absolutely. Sorry for the delayed response.

Free carding in Stud8 is not a spot where you have to be balanced because you can't really be exploited. When you check back 6th, you can't ever be led into on 7th, so you really have nothing to worry about. Whether or not you bet 6th should be a pure equity calculation.

I don't know if balancing is super important pre flop in O8, but I will say that I rarely cap since the equities are generally so close. In fact, I'd argue that most spots where people cap are not GTO. I think that only spots that you should be capping in are ones in which you know that you have significantly better equity than the field given that you know what hands people tend to play/raise/reraise, and these tend to be high only hands.

A postflop balancing spot might be betting/raising a 2H2L board with unmade, combo draw hand to balance your strong highs. There are quite literally an infinite number of spots like this.

I personally think all mixed game books are outdated, but I'd put Ray's book at the top of the list.

Not familiar. I will look them up now. Thanks.

I do. I could make a compelling argument for playing more hands that contain 2-3 wheels cards without an ace. There are at least 3 reasons.

High-only hands, double-suited hands, and double-paired hands are undervalued.

We are in agreement.

Completely unnecessary. Maybe useful for someone who just started playing.

Playing too passively and playing face-up.

In games where 7-8 people see the flop, variance will be huge, but you should take the extra equity when you have it and raise with hands that do well multiway.

I don't. Maybe I can talk to the TD at Bay to see what he can do. Or I could just host a game at my place in Santa Cruz.

This is a classic "it depends" situation, but what it depends on is our relative/absolute position. If both check to us, we absolutely have to bet. However, if we are OOP and the villain next to us will bet if checked to, we should go for the c/r to squeeze a little more value out of the hand. This should only be used if the board is dry because we don't want to fade too many scoop outs. I have played this exact hand as a check/call, bet/call, bet/3bet, and check/raise depending on what I thought about the situation.

Freerolls are generally more of a concern HU than multiway pots.

Late post maybe, but nice thread Andrew. I studied economics myself (just undergrad) and was checking out Gary Becker. I would like to read some of his material. Any specific recommendations?

I did cringe a little when you mentioned Paul Krugman. He seems to have become the PR man for the government/Federal Reserve/banking cartel's Keynesian approach to pulling the US out of the financial crisis since 2008/2009. In other words, the whole "liquidity trap" idea suggesting that aggressive stimulus and money printing are essential to driving aggregate demand. IMHO, I don't believe it has worked recently, and one could even argue that it never worked (even during the Great Depression).

Not to start an economics debate in a poker thread, but I was curious if you had any thoughts about this.

Here's a list of Gary's papers. It's hard to pick out just a couple. He definitely tackled a wide variety of topics. Economics of drugs, crime, the household, fertility, habits, addiction, etc etc.

Regarding Krugman, I think his records speaks for itself. As far as current policy is concerned, stimulus works and austerity doesn't. The bailout in 2008 wasn't big enough. We are in uncharted territory with nominal interest rates as low as they are (zero lower bound, liquidity trap), but I think our country is handling it better than anyone else.

Great! I will take a look.

Oh boy, we are not going to see eye to eye on this haha. Perhaps it is best for now to just say "time will tell," as we are certainly in uncharted territory. Should be an interesting couple of years coming up for the US economy.

Ummmm Europe and the UK economy?? We are the 5th largest economy in the world by the way and we are conducting austerity. Our economy is now in a better position than it was pre 2008. Europe has thrown money at the problem and is sinking. I am no macroeconomist, but not sure that is a correct statement.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/real...-major-economy

It's clearly far more complex than austerity is bad, stimulus good.

Oh btw I have stumbled on Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman. Very good so far. Just noticed you recommended him. Interesting that it questions everything I was taught about the rational actor in 6th form and undergraduate economics. How do they get away with teaching such bs?

FWIW, the doomsayers have been wrong since 2009...so if you wanted to make a bet about the future on negative outcomes, you would've done quite poorly.

To be completely honest, though, it's the fundamentals I care about it. Fundamentally, the government needs to do more to stimulate the economy to improve general welfare.

I should've chosen my words more carefully. Of all the countries that were adversely affected by the global recession, the U.S. has had the best recovery. I don't think that is debated in the economic community. It should be a truism that is taught the first day of Econ 101: You don't cut your way out of recession, you spend your way out of a recession.

Danny Kahneman is the best. They aren't exactly teaching BS. They are teaching useful simplifications. For example, perhaps you remember taking physics in school? Nearly all problems involving movement of objects are assume to take place in a frictionless vacuum. Is that realistic? Of course not. But it makes the problems tractable for those just getting started.

I can assure you that graduate students gradually strip away some of the more outlandish assumptions. You also have to remember that Danny's work is like 40 years old, so it takes time for the ideas to permeate.

You might be interested in knowing that when I TA'ed Introductory Micro, behavioral economics made up an entire chapter of the book.

It seems we are both guilty of using the word "work" without defining what we meant.


and

My guess is that we actually have different definitions, which makes it difficult to debate monetary policy. Part of it is a question of more government intervention vs. less government intervention. If the government had not enacted spending and other stimuli, we would have seen a harsher crash that included more corporate failures and sharper losses in the financial markets, as well as deflation of various goods and assets. At the same time, we would have been able to hit the reset button on much of our debt. Furthermore, the average person's savings would have been intact, unlike they were during the Depression, because these are federally insured nowadays.

By enacting the stimulus, on the other hand, we avoided an immediate drop, but we did not eliminate the culture of debt that rules America. The banks and other corporations that took huge risks were simply forgiven, throwing future risk/reward calculations out of whack. It would be like if I blew my poker roll taking massive shots, and then Pokerstars just said "Oh, don't worry, here is a new bankroll." I would have no reason to believe that I should not go on taking shots and playing like a maniac.

There was going to be pain either way. If it has not happened yet, then it will someday. The idea behind stimulus is to lengthen the period of deleveraging and sort of "smooth out" the pain. I hope this is happening and that we do not face another crash of greater magnitude in the future.

As you mentioned elsewhere, we may look better than some other countries since 2008, but there is certainly much to be pessimistic about:

- The wealth gap between the richest few and the rest has grown ever since WWII and has spiraled out of control since the Fed enacted quantitative easing
- The number of people on Food Stamps has risen from ~27,000,000 to over 45,000,000. This could be seen as the stimulus making its way to Main Street, but it is unsettling to think that 45 million people cannot fully feed themselves
- There is still a heavy dose of unemployment and underemployment (people working part-time unskilled labor). The government will throw around a 5% number for unemployment, but it does not tell the whole story. Total # employed/Total population is still well off its pre-crisis levels. (Some of this may be due to more seniors retiring, I admit.)
- Median net wealth (assets - debt) is still very low. Statistics seem to vary on this, but I found one measure showing that median wealth for Americans in 2013 was roughly the same as it had been in real terms in the mid-60s
- Rent is increasing year over year at a rate of 8% currently, while home ownership is understandably down since the mortgage crisis. This is conveniently left out of the government's inflation statistics.
- Other things that may or may not be indirectly affected by government spending/intervention include healthcare costs increasing 8-10% annually, mass murder and rioting, and suicide

I agree this could work in some ways, including spending on infrastructure, alternative energy research, and education.

Ok, one more post. Sorry! Haha I really don't want to derail the thread, but I miss discussing this with intelligent people. Most of the people I see in my daily life don't even know what the Federal Reserve does... Also, finance has a lot of interesting parallels with poker : )

My last point is this: if the zero interest rate policy has truly benefited the US, it is partly because the US dollar is the reserve world currency. The world economy has faith in the USD, but that's all it is, faith.

Other countries could not print $1 trillion a year and still convince everyone those bills were worth more than the paper they were printed on. In fact, other countries have done this, and they experienced hyperinflation. The US has ridden its dominance as far as it could, but what if (and this is a big "if") things changed? What if people begin to turn their back on the dollar and instead seek other assets as payment for debt? Just food for thought

Hi barber, nice well.

In a loose table where players are trying to see flops and aren't afraid to call bets. What would be your 3b range from and tabe like this?

Test:

1) Who owns the Federal Reserve?
2) What does the Fed do?
3) How do the tools and mandate at the Fed differ from BoE, ECB and BoJ?

Not true. The BoJ has been printing and has committed to continue to print, around $800 billion/year. That $800 billion is roughly equal to all of the hard currency in the USA today. The Fed and BoE are taking a hiatus on QE while the ECB and BoJ get radical.

My questions to you are:

1) The BoJ decided to use a theory proposed by the Fed Vice (Yellen, now Chair) of negative interest rates combined with QE and other expansionary monetary AND fiscal policies. Why has the JPY appreciated by 10-15% vs the USD in the last 12 months?

** it is true that "safe haven" status and carry trades have a larger influence in Japan than elsewhere but this reasoning does not "balance" the fundamentals. Then I would ask:

2) If low (negative) IBORs, slow GDP growth and crippling debt are assumed to be quantifiable fundamentals, how can we explain that the value of single currency Europe increased by 5% relative to the USA in 2016? Mohamed El-Erian (former CEO Pimco) said that this shocked him. The USD/EUR was around 109 before the ECB went with negative rates and increased other expansionary policies, yet the USD/EUR went UP to 114 thereafter and has stayed there.

3) In the context of Axis Banks (Fed, BoE, ECB, BoJ) what do recent currency and GDP growth deltas say about the efficacy of recent and future monetary policies?

4) If the global financial markets today show large volatility in core assets (4 main currency pairs, gov securities) and high volatility = high risk, what does that say about the current global economy? If most attempts to answer these 4 questions swing back to debt and the only way to pay this debt (UK, Japan, Europe, USA) and achieve growth is with expansionary monetary and fiscal policies, how can the debt ever be paid if monetary and fiscal policies continue to lose efficacy?

This will happen but we won't be swapping USD for EUR or RMB

We are headed towards a nightmare society where all USD have been converted to digital currency. To participate in the market (ANY market) people will be required to comply with entry criteria rules (ID verification etc). The net result is a system that controls all goods and services with a gatekeeper who must be appeased. Any persons falling short of "desirable" according to the market makers (those who own the digital assets) will be cut off entirely from society, with no means of trade in advanced economies where cash is illegal.

There are many instances right now where cash is borderline "illegal" and security services will investigate if you make any cash transaction > $1,000 or even if you pay for hotel rooms or plane tickets by cash (the NSA says this is the behaviour of a terrorist). In the near future it will become illegal to make any substantial payment in cash.

The banks are deliriously enthusiastic about a framework that requires every person on Earth to conform to their criteria and use their payment services for 100% of all transactions. Preliminary meetings have been taking place for several years and now that blockchain and similar technologies have gone mainstream, it is possible to pay any bill instantly.

Today if you make an electronic payment for your mortgage or any bill you have to send payment several days before the payment is due. This is because what is sent is the "instruction" to debit one bank account and credit another, the reconciliation/confirmation of which takes time. In our future cashless society ruled by large banks the asset itself (digital currency) will be transferred instantly without further instruction or delay.

I'm not a macro guy, but people seem to be interested in it, so...

ZLB (zero lower bound) isn't a choice, it's what the central bank is forced to do in a recession. It is now referred to as the ELB (effective lower bound) because apparently the economy doesn't abhor slightly negative rates. Many are shocked by this, but it's not expected in the US.

Being able to print your own currency is HUGE, and for that reason we are really lucky. We can print our way out of debt and that is a good thing. I'd much rather be in the US than China or the EU. And you needn't worry about hyper-inflation.

I'm not sure this is technically correct or maybe I don't understand what you mean. According to the ECB, the ZLB is not as binding as we think it is....

I agree printing your own currency is HUGE. The difference in economic recovery rates between the USA, UK and EZ can arguably be explained by monetary policy alone - the USA got it right by spending big, the UK got it kind of right by spending a little (if $750 billion is a little) and the EZ totally ****ed it up by denying nations access to unconditional ECB funds.

Not having to worry about hyper-inflation is by itself a worry. It just does not make sense for the USA to dilute the USD by a factor of 5 relative to hard currency and for there to be low inflation. Money is created by banks through loans and the magnitude of this new money >> QE but as we know, QE exists to enable banks to lend more. In the UK inflation is pretty much zero and has flirted with deflation. In Japan there is deflation despite historic and radical moves by the BoJ. Japan is much smaller than the USA, has no global reserve currency status and has (will have) printed roughly the same amount as the USA - $4.5 trillion. If we exclude the recent drop in oil price and factor in one-off boosts to inflation like the April 2014 consumption tax hike (+3% inflation), Japan is still struggling with deflation.

On the side I recently read a paper that disputes the pre-eminence of global reserve currency status. The paper argues the USA had overtaken the UK on several measures prior to Bretton Woods. The conclusion is the advantages from global reserve status are not insurmountable

Our golden rule for a sustainable economy is 3% growth and 2% inflation. Without one you can't maintain the other indefinitely, so the lack of inflation in advanced markets is a real worry for growth prospects. We can't raise rates to historical norms as many households, corps and some banks would then become insolvent. Solving growth issues without raising interest rates is the dilemma facing treasuries and central banks today. Efforts thus far have only succeeded in raising inequalities and inequality itself (or segregation of any kind) leads inexorably to economic under-performance. Some may describe this as the velocity of money problem - what we want is a "bottom-up" economy. What we are getting is a "top-down" economy where 99% of benefits from QE and new technology is in the hands of 1%.

I still think the merits of such massive bailouts after the crisis are debatable, but I seem to be alone there, so I will let it go and celebrate the fact that society maintained some measure of stability as a result of the stimulus.

However, we do seem to agree on the following points, right?

I would be hard-pressed to explain the currency fluctuations you asked about, but this last point is important. These banks are trying everything, and yet it appears the endgame for the debt is unclear.

True economic growth comes from innovation and productivity, aided by capital accumulation. Many people think central banks can simply wave their magic wands and create growth and inflation by throwing money around. At best, this loses efficacy over time as currency becomes diluted and interest rates go as low as they can (whether this is 0 or below). At worst, we have serious inequality and misallocation of capital, along with societal problems such as frustration, anger, violence, etc. that stem from this inequality and lack of wealth creation.

In the end, it might help if the market is a little more free, and people can focus on producing goods and services instead of trying to guess what central banks are going to do next or trying to game the system. Perhaps deflation is a natural correction for societies that have lived beyond their means and we must accept it instead of trying to push it down the road or cover it up.

This is certainly interesting too. Ideally, a digital currency like Bitcoin would be outside of the regulation of the state. Will they try to overtake Bitcoin and force their regulations upon it?

I can't explain the FX either so don't worry! I think the endgame for debt is don't live long enough to pay it back. We dream of future growth and technological marvels that the next generation will use to pay our debts - same as the generation before us!

Maybe you are right but if we have deflation in advanced markets it's a vicious circle. There can be no growth without inflation (historically) and if there is no growth, the books can't be balanced without austerity. We know austere policies severely impact future growth and ability to service long-term debts. Damned if you do .......

The major governments and banks hate BTC as they can't track and trace what is purchased, nor can they control the money supply. Rothchild's Maxim, "give me control of a nation's money supply and I care not who makes her laws"

I'm 100% sure the state wants to control BTC but the manufacturing process is designed to be limiting (control inflation) so BTC couldn't be rolled out over large areas. There's no room for expansionary policies with BTC

The new system and digital currency the banks want will mean 100% of all economic activity is tracked and recorded. The market makers who own the datasets would have virtual omnipotence and leverage on everybody. Think your prescriptions, diet, vices, gifts.......the death of privacy even in your own home. Ordinarily that would be unconstitutional but some asshats (like banks and currently powerful people) will become demi-gods so my guess is they will win the media spin battle.

I didn't really answer you

They can't overtake BTC because there is no central ownership structure. The market makers (make/buy/sell/rate) are 100,000 + ordinary people around the world

BTC bans could be enforced in the mainstream but not everywhere. It wouldn't take a big % of the entire world to make BTC a major currency, should they become disaffected with the system.

Thanks for the well AB, I will keep chat poker now!

If any currency "printed" has a corresponding obligation greater than its nominal value (due to interest also being due), how does "printing" more currency allow for complete repayment of the debt?

If the same amount of each good and service was produced/consumed at the same continuous rate, but the price continuously increased, would you consider that growth?

If I could impart any macroeconomic truisms, one would be that total debt doesn't matter. Only debt to GDP matter. On this measure, we are totally fine. Regarding printing your way out of debt, I mean to say that we can always print the amount needed to service our debt. Having this ability is really important because it gives you power over your debt holders.

Growth is another discussion entirely. I don't know if we will ever again see the levels of growth previously seen in this country, so we need to get used to that idea. Furthermore, it might be worth reevaluating as what we define as "growth".

Might be time for some of that effective altruism, eh?

Now you're talking! If I'm the US and I have to choose between 2% growth and pulling 10 million people out of poverty, I have to think that the latter is better for the country long-term.