Saturday, April 25, 2009

efficient coinflipping

it's 3am and i've just got a ticket to turbo takedown..woo-hoo! i think i played like 4-5 satellites but i didn't waste much time - in the first 2 i didn't last more than 15 minutes though i made probably top 1/3..that was quick! 1000 starting chip, blinds raise every 5 minutes so it was brutal. in the beginning i played very tight(after only 5mins your M is well below 10!) but then i realised i can't win more flips than anyone else so i've decided to play exploitatevly since other people made strange moves: open-raised with half of their stacks and then folded on flops or called raises and folded to flop minraises etc. my idea was to make my stack slightly greater than the average to steal some blinds and then play conservatively again when others start shoving like crazy. i think i made top 200 twice(maybe once actually) and eventually made top 100. nh!
but still this structure is brutal! here's a quote from Benjamin Graham's "Intelligent Investor":

Let’s assume we get 225 million Americans up tomorrow morning and we ask them all to wager a dollar. They go out in the morning at sunrise, and they all call the flip of a coin. If they call correctly, they win a dollar from those who called wrong. Each day the losers drop out, and on the subsequent day the stakes build as all previous winnings are put on the line. After ten flips on ten mornings, there will be approximately 220,000 people in the United States who have correctly called ten flips in a row. They each will have won a little over $1,000.

Now this group will probably start getting a little puffed up about this, human nature being what it is. They may try to be modest, but at cocktail parties they will occasionally admit to attractive members of the opposite sex what their technique is, and what marvelous insights they bring to the field of flipping.

Assuming that the winners are getting the appropriate rewards from the losers, in another ten days we will have 215 people who have successfully called their coin flips 20 times in a row and who, by this exercise, each have turned one dollar into a little over $1 million. $225 million would have been lost, $225 million would have been won.
By then, this group will really lose their heads. They will probably write books on “How I Turned a Dollar into a Million in Twenty Days Working Thirty Seconds a Morning.” Worse yet,they’ll probably start jetting around the country attending seminars on efficient coin-flipping and tackling skeptical professors with, “If it can’t be done, why are there 215 of us?”

But then some business school professor will probably be rude enough to bring up the fact that if 225 million orangutans had engaged in a similar exercise, the results would be much the same—215 egotistical orangutans with 20 straight winning flips.

it's very true and noone has an edge in coinflipping..so i have some thoughts on playing in close to the "move-in" stages that i want to test. thats why small ball is great for deep stack tournaments - you don't have to risk all your chips to grow your stack above the average(so it'll be safer in the "move in" stage)..but unfortunately online mtts aren'y deepstacked

2 comments:

  1. one word of advice, don't chase any flushes just because you have the A.

    Unless they have a gay name like loan$hark or something like that...

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  2. hehe..KGB is watching me i guess. with 2 overcards and nut flush draw i was only 2 to 1 dog and he was offering me almost 3 to 1 to call...and i still had decent amount of chips behind so even if i lost it's not the end of the world. i liked that particular hand though i switched to chip-spewing mode later on

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