Hacking in Poker: Bluff the protocol

Everyone is so fascinated by this whole ‘bluffing’ aspect of the game of poker. It’s not that big a deal. It’s important, because you can’t really win money if you don’t bluff sometimes. At least statistically.

It’s really simple. If you always have good cards, no one will call you, and then you can’t take their money. And that is very, very sad.

Bluffing is easy if you can grok this one thing (not to mention you grok grok.) The poker turn and betting sequence is laid out like a protocol. Each action is a statement.

// Warning, Poker VooDoo

For example, let’s say you have big slick and you’re under the gun. It’s wise to make a bet 2-3 times the big blind to say you’ve got something. And if you bet in that position, you’d almost better have something.

Now if you are lying with your bet about what cards you hold, they call it bluffing. I call it hacking, and I use NLP. And, well… here is one more tiny interesting fact: The whole poker betting protocol is much much simpler than TCP/IP.

<music type=”GypParadoyThemeSong”>Do do do dum, do dum do, Wait for it…. </music>

Grok it yet?

And later I’ll tell you how to hack the entire poker system. 😉

My definition of gambling

Copyright (C) June 20, 2011
by Thowi

While working on my thesis, I learned some top-secret scary government voodoo math called lambda calculus.

I’m going to do a blog post on that subject later, but I want to talk about poker for right now.

You see, poker is really a very, very simple game.  (I know TCP/IP baby.)

It only requires some very simple statistics done with just whole numbers…  And I can do scary voodoo math in my head.

So my definition of gambling:

How I take money from people who can’t do math.  With Poker!

Of course there is this other fun game I’m interested in that uses fractions!

If I can get some research money, in about 6 months I’m going to write a book:

How to Hack Hold ‘Em with VooDoo: An NLP Language in Lisp

Game Theory and Financial Risk Analysis:
An Introduction With Poker

A Text book for a university level computer science course I would like to teach… with Lisp.
But it’s a language for thought… I’m not sure how to describe it just yet.

Thinking about starting a company…