So many reasons, why you don't wanna talk about poker with your non-poker-friends

ME TOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

so i'm not at work one day and one co-worker finds out that my brother is a professional somehow (during the world series). conversation next day:

him: so your brother is pretty big time huh - do you play as well? - also invites me to a homegame with a bunch of "donkeys" (his favorite word)

me: yeah, mostly online

him: I just don't trust online - I just envision 3 or 4 people sitting together and colluding - do you trust it?

me: yeah, well I play headsup

him: yeah, but aren't you worried about collluding?

WHAT

THE

F**K

LOL, awesome.

I mentioned to my dad one day that I played online poker. He goes on to tell me how his friend's mom lost like 10k and it's rigged. I didn't say anything because I felt bad telling him that she must of been a total donkey

Most of my friends know about my online poker adventures and they're generally cool about it but I never tell any girls about it unless it comes up in conversation somewhere along the line cos girls ask the dumbest questions ldo...

i actually dont have any problems like you guys have hahah. lucky me

I remember watching this show and wondering if the offer sizes were correlated with race or gender. I actually collected some data by watching a few episodes (not statistically significant at all of course).

But yea women and minorities don't seem to get very good offers

I don't think it's a sport either. And the best reply to his 2nd/3rd points is "let's play!". He's also kind of right on the 3rd :]

As someone has already pointed out, its always +EV to decline the banks offer. But as same person also pointed out, when it comes to risking 100k to winning 1 mil or something, not everyone has enough money to gamble such sums, and sell out instead. (And also because they dont realize its -EV i guess.) Edit: What amazes me though is that there is actually a Deal or no Deal video game, how this can exist, and not be boring as **** (without giving you real money if you win.

1st post great thread

I've seen +EV bank offers.

Wow astroglide, seeing your sn takes me back down 2p2 memory lane. Sigh, remember the good ol' days when there were like 1000 members and actual strat posts?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-sK4Lz60aU

HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA

I tried to eat while watching this and couldnt.

Beat me to it, although you should start with part 1 Way too much unnecessary swearing in all Angry Video Game xxxx type videos, including this imitator of the original, but I think it's a fairly accurate demonstration of the game's entertainment value.

I don't think the Kelly criterion applies to this game at all... Kelly's formula applies to a bet and has to do with optimizing the size of the bet for a specific bankroll for an outcome that will either lose the bet or win at X odds. There is no bankroll in DoND and only speculative money is risked during the course of the show, so the player is freerolling.

When a player turns down an offer he is required to open a set number of cases which represents anywhere from a fifth to half of the current remaining cases. What he is doing each time he rejects an offer is playing a random game revealing more information about cases which aren't his. A formula could be made for it, but the basic idea is that every case he opens, he is randomly altering his odds. The higher the player runs above standard expectation in terms of his luck opening cases (reveals low values instead of high values), the higher the chance that opening the next case could greatly alter his EV for the game as determined by (sum of all case values remaining / cases, including his, remaining).

As has been said, the point of the game is that for every player, there comes a point where it is +lifeEV to take an offer where the value of the potential negative variance of opening more cases represents such a significant amount that it is desirable to settle for a percentage of the Mean of the remaining values than eliminate points from the set. That is what makes it interesting, because the offers are always based on the Mean of the remaining money, but a situation will inevitably arise where none of the data points are anywhere near the mean.

To help people understand the EV of it... if a $1, $5, $10, $50k, and a $100k case remain (one of them is yours)... your EV over infinite trials is the mean of these values, $30k, and the offer will likely be around 70-90% of the mean. Now, if you have to open one more case it puts the system into one of 5 possible states. the average new EV of all these possible outcomes is still around $30k, but the actuality of the situation is that the new EV will be ~$37k 60% of the time (if any of the 3 small values are removed), $25k 20% of the time, and $12.5k 20% of the time. So, oddly, opening a case here is an almost 0EV situation (even with an offer of 100% of the mean), but because the cases contain discrete values the EV is necessarily changing by at least $5k in some direction or another once one is eliminated.

very well put.

Well they know the job& situation of the contender. So they make the cheapest offers to the people who need it the most.

This is true, btw. After investigating a few episodes, the theme is clear that the deals get progressively better as the cases go down and large sums are still in play. I think the offer is also indeed tailored to the individual contestant, but I think it's primarily based on their personality and aggressiveness. There are occasional joke offers on some versions of the show that are consistent with this approach; the point of the show is, after all, entertainment of viewers.

Easy example of +ev offer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spGDr...eature=related

Some guy's blog that explains this arguably better than I did with my long-winded paragraph: http://www.pearsonified.com/2006/03/..._real_deal.php

EPIC

[x] the right answer to keep masturbating

I would keep going all in. How do you not say that.

What about the tactic of trying to trap her with some backdoor action?

Collin Moshman makes a very similar point in Sit n' Go Strategy, page 216:

But in a multi-table tournament, if the prize jumps are significant relative to your bankroll, risk aversion may allow for some "coasting". If moving up one or two rungs on the ladder ensures your ability to make profitable future investments, you might reasonably decline a marginally positive equity play.

On deal or no deal? whut. Guess I was wrong then.