Billiards Is a Good Game (1975)
mag.uchicago.edu
mag.uchicago.edu
If anybody needs translation:
In bridge you bid how many tricks you will take; there are 13 tricks and the minimum bid is 7 (i.e. you will take over half). If you make at least as many as you bid, your score is positive, if you make fewer than you bid your score is negative. You get bonus points for bidding at a certain level; "game" is 9-11 tricks depending on the situation (10 tricks is the most common for reasons I won't get into here). "small slam" (or little slam in this article) is 12 tricks and "grand slam" is 13 tricks.
You have two opponents in bridge and a finesse is a play that depends on cards being in the correct opponents hand. Most common is which opponent holds a king when you have an ace and a queen. If you can force them to decide to play the king or not before you play, then you beat the king with an ace, or beat the lower card they play with the queen. A "long finesse" (called a "deep finesse" today) requires more than one card to be in the correct position, so attempting one is a move of last resort.
Now the translation. He bid to make 9 or 10 tricks, but saw that he could make 12 tricks if all of the cards were in the position maximally lucky for him. Since he did not bid high enough to get the bonus for winning those, the reward is tiny, and he should just make the obvious plays to cover his bid. Instead he took the risky play and ended up not even making the 9 or 10 that he bid. This is the sort of mistake that even an intermediate bridge player learns not to make very quickly, but a beginner couldn't make this mistake at all because they wouldn't see the opportunity. So Michelson is smart but a terrible bridge player.
I'm struggling to think of an equivalently bad play in poker; maybe staying in the pot when your hand is the low-pair after the flop and several others have already called?
Your hand is good, with the former possibility of being the nuts, but there's also a chance that someone out there is holding Q (or possibly QQ) of a straight and you're dead already.
I think you have to include the element of changing strategy. Something like you open with possibility of strong pair(s) bu t don't flop them, now you are going for an unlikely straight against betting that suggests you shouldn't. The EV on pot doesn't make sense but you stay in?
Level 0: My opponent made a large bet because he has a strong hand. I should fold.
Level 1: My opponent made a large bet because he knows that I will think it looks like he has a strong hand, when in fact he has a weak hand. I should call.
Level 2: My opponent knows that I think his large bets are bluffs, so he is now making a large bet assuming that I will wrongly assume he is bluffing. I should fold.
Level N: (if N is odd, I should call; if N is even, I should fold)
Beginner players will only think at level 0 or 1, but intermediate/advanced players may sometimes end up "leveling" themselves into a bad decision.
For example, if you're facing a big bet where you can only beat bluffs (e.g. all missed draws), but lose to any value bets (e.g. sets, straights, flushes), then you'll need to mainly be folding, but to avoid being exploitable you'll also need to call down with some percentage of these mid-strength hands (where the exact number depends on the bet size relative to the pot).
To decide which bluff-catchers you want to call down with, you'll want to pick hands that don't block any of your opponent's bluffs (e.g. you don't want to be holding the Ace of Spades on a flop that had two spades but a third didn't come by the river, since having this card eliminates a number of likely missed flush draws that your opponent might be bluffing with). In addition, you'll also want to pick hands that DO block some of your opponents value bets (e.g. your hand contains one or two cards that block your opponent from having straights, flushes, sets).
Naturally, calling down with the correct ratios is rather hard and only the best players can do so with any consistency, but it does remove the whole levelling guess work and reduces the decision to something you can reason about.
Personal experience: Are you playing against a good player? Bad players tend to make very wonky decision, which makes it harder to make good assumptions on what they are playing. In that case, you play by the book on probabilities, because over time you will make more money. There's also "tighter" and "loser" players, who will bet more/less respectively with better or worse hands. Finally you could have a tell or a feel for a player you know for a while.
Position: Betting is highly dependend on the relative position he has at the table. Let's consider two situations, both pre-flop, with five players at the table: First situation, the person after the small blind bets a largre amount. He still has 3 people "behind" him, where he has 0 information on what they are going to do. They could re-raise him, call or fold. He puts himself in a very risky situation by handing over control to the people "that have position" on him.
Second situation, the same player makes a raise as the big blind. In this situation, everyone before him either folded or called, implying they don't have strong hands. He can use this situation to push more people out of the pot, or prepare for a larger bet on the flop. ("Preparing" in the sense that a larger pot makes it more difficult for people to fold to bets. If you have a flush draw and are supposed to pay 20€ to see the next card, the value is very different if it is a 40€ or 200€ pot).
Range: This is the trickiest and coolest part of playing poker. Basically you are trying to find out what cards your opponent holds so you can make a better decision. At the same time, you would like to conceal what cards you hold yourself. Consider the two situations from before: A large bet in second position does imply 1 thing: You probably don't want many players to join for the flop. This in return implies you have something good, that could easily get overturned if someone hits a flop. Small Pairs are very likely. In the second situation, it is much more difficult to limit your range. You are defending the big blind, so you're already invested. You are either raising for value because you have a strong hand (AK, AQ, 89 suited etc.). Or you realized no one raised so you want to "act" as if you have a strong hand, potentially steal the blinds or set yourself up for a later bluff.
Edit: I probably should've just posted Daniel Negreanu's channel, he's a much better player than I am and probably also better at explaining. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3N4X2KgtefdYT6dGleeo...
RoShamBo strategies attempt to predict what the opponent will do. Given a successful prediction, it is easy to defeat the opponent (if you know they will play rock, you play paper). However, straightforward prediction will often fail; the opponent may not be vulnerable to prediction, or worse, they might have anticipated your predictive logic and played accordingly. Iocaine Powder's meta-strategy expands any predictive algorithm P into six possible strategies:
P.0: naive application Assume the opponent is vulnerable to prediction by P; predict their next move, and play to beat it. If P predicts your opponent will play rock, play paper to cover rock. This is the obvious application of P.
P.1: defeat second-guessing Assume the opponent thinks you will use P.0. If P predicts rock, P.0 would play paper to cover rock, but the opponent could anticipate this move and play scissors to cut paper. Instead, you play rock to dull scissors.
P.2: defeat triple-guessing Assume the opponent thinks you will use P.1. Your opponent thinks you will play rock to dull the scissors they would have played to cut the paper you would have played to cover the rock P would have predicted, so they will play paper to cover your rock. But you one-up them, playing scissors to cut their paper.
At this point, you should be getting weary of the endless chain. "We could second-guess each other forever," you say. But no; because of the nature of RoShamBo, P.3 recommends you play paper -- just like P.0! So we're only left with these three strategies, each of which will suggest a different alternative. (This may not seem useful to you, but have patience.)
[1] - https://www.rhinologyonline.org/Rhinology_online_issues/2018...
I once played my younger brother to 50 wins (whoever got there first was the unquestioned champion of RPS). It got very, very meta and there was drama in every round. We would pace around planning the next move and then meet up and shoot. An unexpected outcome after that much planning and pressure created some hilarity.
Long story short, I beat him 50-28, so I do feel I was out leveling/reading him to some degree. Maybe some obvious pattern I picked up on but didn't notice.
Ps, we were both adults. Great game though.
Maybe design some kind of goofy little arena for them. Let them dress up in costumes. Put some medium stakes charity donation on the line. An announcer and color commentator calling the match.
I wanna see Ken Jennings take on Annie Duke. Dennis Rodman battle Sebastian Bach.
He says “Pool” whenever he’s referring to pocket billiards, the game that most people are familiar with.
You're right about 3 balls, but there are pockets in a billiards table and you do get points for pocketing the correct ball.[0]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snooker#/media/File%3ASnooke...
Snooker is played with 21 colored balls which must be pocketed in the correct order.
Billiards is played with 3 balls, 1 white per player (one has a black dot and the other doesn't) and a red ball.
Billiards table is bigger than the American Pool tables.
My aim was to explain the author’s terminology for those who’ve never seen a table without pockets.
I've played a fair bit of snooker and billiards (English billiards in US terms), and it's always been played on a full size snooker table. That's 12ft by 6ft.
This means that the game is "English Billiards" with the pockets. A delicate stroke won't help in the "no-pocket billiards" as a valid shot needs to hit (atleast) 3 cushions.
I play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_billiards semi regularly here in the UK, which is apparently of Russian origin as well!
I have seen tables in two other pubs around the city, but never seen them in use there.
That has tighter pockets than American (or English) pool, although not as tight as these Russian ones. It adds significant difficulty with the structure of play with the coloured balls.
https://www.yelp.com/biz/legend-billiards-and-snooker-sf-san...
> The waitress told us he drew sketches of the faculty he did not care to eat with. She said they all had long noses.
...it sets off strange alarm bells, but I don't quite have the cultural context to figure out how I should interpret it. Of course, everyone knows that long noses are a Jewish stereotype, and that in the 70s when this article was written, anti-semitism was far enough out of fashion that it would have been impolite to express it in more than an oblique way. Can someone explain to me what MacLean was trying to say here? I know Michelson himself was of Jewish descent, which makes the comment all the more confusing.
this was a nice life lesson for me, learned while playing 3-cushion in college. the KISS principle was something i'd heard of before, but sometimes only experience can knock sense into you.
I wonder if thats 40 caroms in cowboy? or 5 racks of 8 ball?
The caption mentions (and shows) cowboy pool: you play with 1, 3, 5 and can score with carom, bouncing the cue off 2 other balls, pocketing also scores the number on the ball till 90; till 100 only caroms score. to get 101 and win, you must scratch off the 1. Fun game, my favorite when not paying for each rack.
They are almost certainly talking about 14:1 continuous which was far and away the most popular pocket billiards game in the 1930s,40s, and 50s.
40 is pretty good but great players regularly run over 100 and John Schmidt just ran 600+
In the game of cowboy, which is sort of a novelty game that is intentionally quirky, you can score points merely by making a carom.
Here's an example I got by Google image searching: https://i.makeagif.com/media/10-30-2015/ODVWHH.gif
Michelson was playing billiards on a table without pockets.
I agree that Michelson wasn’t playing 3-cushion because not even Willie Hoppe (best player of that era) had runs 10 or 12 on a daily basis.
Balkline was still popular as an amateur game in the 1920s, so Michelson could have been playing one of the balkline variants rather than straight rail.
Level of difficulty in billiards ...
Straight Rail < Balkline < Cushion Caroms < 3-Cushion