Question:Is Poker a game of skill? Poker is a game of bluff. To Bluff: To deceive (an opponent in cards) by a bold bet ...please hit "reply" to follow this thought on wiki.
yes, and here we are, almost in real time.
== UNIVERSITY Interest In and Concerns About Poker ==
Harvard chooses the best students in the world to come here to learn. We see many of them become intensely interested in playing the game of poker. It behooves us to ask: What is to be learned from playing poker? What is to be feared? Can we mitigate the risks our fears represent?
We have an opportunity to research a magnificent digital data base opened to us by the online poker industry for purposes of research. We propose an open academic inquiry into questions of interest and concern. We go where the questions lead. Understand that research must be unfettered, not channeled to any pre-determined result.
We propose to explore the place of poker in the university world, in American and global society, in American and global law, in cyberspace, following our questions where they lead.
- *How great and how serious are the dangers of addiction? Are there signals of addiction which could be discerned and used to warn those at risk?
- *Is Poker women-friendly? What has been the history and what is the trajectory of female participation in poker? How can the data be queried?
- *Is poker competitive with the educational mission of university or to be embraced by it? What is the reality of concern about distraction of youth?
- *Can measures be developed and empirical work structured relevant to the legal regulation of poker?
- *Does poker differentially impact low income people?
- *Is there danger of society losing its best minds to professional poker?
- *Is Poker a game of skill?
- *Has anyone improved on Nez Ankeny's bluffing algorithm since i wrote my poker program in 1982?
How would one query the data in order to test these questions?
--There are many possibilities and permutations in a statistical model. Basic MLE: dichotomous dependent variable--bluff, no bluff. Independent variables: bet size, strength of hand, gender, size of pot, siz of player's chip stack, size of opponent's chip stack, number of prior hands played, size of blink, big blind/small blind/no blind, and theoretically interesting interactions between any of the above. Interact these with income. The qualitative questions are left to inference from this and other data.
We can also request input from an interested world. We can learn from our students what, in their perception, they learn and risk.
We seek in the discussion and list of invitees people who can help us think things through and structure research queries to the data.
David Parkes
Ari Pfeffer
Andy Bloch
Annie Duke
Howard Lederer
Jay Kadane
Steven Leavitt
Sen. Alfonse D'Amato
Duncan Watts
Justice Antonin Scalia
David Sklansky
Mike Sexton
Andrew Woods
Alan Stone
Elena Kagan
Theodore Stebbins
Jonathan Zittrain
Nick Marshall
Howard Shaffer
Bill Dutton
put the list up on a wiki
let folks add their names
Michael Bolcerek, head of Poker Players Alliance
April 24, 2007
Major companies in the Interactive Gaming Counsel, Party Gaming, 888, Full Tilt, Poker Stars, Micro Gaming:
Help us make the event a fundraiser for the open domain of UNIVERSITY. We invite the online poker industry to become an exemplar of forward thinking in understanding and supporting the quest for truth and open access to knowledge in the cyber domain. By putting poker in service of the open domain of university we will affirm an ethic of goodness and public benefit that the game itself is sometimes missing.
What do i want from you?
- a little cash up front
- a blank check going forward which you can stop at any time
- open access to your data
The Wisdom of Poker in the words of Kenny Rogers - The Gambler
- call for papers, call for talking points,
- is there a journal that would publish
- can we form one
- open access poker number one