[nimbleal]

If you’ve ever played poker where you’re the only serious player at the table and everyone else is very loose you’ll know it’s almost impossible to win. By taking lots of risky bets the other players aren’t doing any favours for themselves personally but as a group they’re (unintentionally) teaming up to guarantee one of their number will have an unassailably large stack. That’s much how I feel about the current investment market.

[TheDudeMan]

Anecdotes aside, I wonder if this is really true. I wonder if it has been tested. Poker bots are strong enough that it should be testable. Is there really a scenario in which a stronger bot reliably loses to a group of weaker bots?

[nimbleal]

I’m not bot-level strength of course but yes, this would be interesting to model/test!

[kevinventullo]

I don’t follow; can’t you play conservatively until you have a great hand and bet accordingly? If the other players are loose, they’ll call with anything.

If they observe you are doing this and don’t play so loose against you, then I would take issue with the claim that they are not playing seriously.

[nimbleal]

You could wait until you have the nuts, but that might never happen. If you play too conservatively you risk just leaking blinds until you have nothing left, and because almost everyone goes in on almost every hand, you're playing against quite diminished odds that you're going to have the best hand.

Perhaps an excellent player might be able to crack the code (or at least be up over the course of enough games), but I'm not an excellent player.