The author makes a lot of assumptions and oversimplifications whilst falling for the mystique of poker as expressed in popular culture. We've all seen the movies where psychological tells ("deception") end up saving (or ruining) the day during a poker game.

Unfortunately, in terms of winning strategies, this couldn't be further from how the game actually plays out today. Back when online poker exploded onto the scene, the old cash game pros quickly discovered that their way of playing the game (described in books like super system and theory of poker) was obsolete.

Seeing veteran poker pros getting crushed in their home turf by teenagers whose playing style was forged in the crucible of online multitabling was the ultimate expose to that old mystique of poker as a psychological battle of deception. One could say that the internet players through their mechanistic play were approximating strategies that were at their core, algorithmic. It's not at all surprising then, to see poker bots today utterly crush certain variants of the game. It won't be long, before poker as a whole succumbs.

I'm not really sure why they chose Among Us as an alternative to poker. Sure, it has a little chance and unknown information, but among us is really more of a social study to see how easily people can be swayed into voting people off.

In my experience if I talk confidently and get the first word in it's pretty easy to cast aside suspicion. In fact, one meta strategy is to kill someone, then report the body yourself and immediately accuse someone else. I've done this when someone witnessed me killing someone, and I actually got -them- voted off. It's all good and fun but I did feel rather scummy for a bit after. :)

Another strategy is to follow someone for a bit in the beginning, such that if you were the imposter you could've killed them, leading them to trust you. Then in voting sessions that person will likely vouch for you.

I had a game that made me better at life once.

Back in the 90's, I played a game called Command & Conquer. And if I used all my resources, I could attack an enemy base and defeat it. But on one game, I didn't leave enough resources behind to survive a counter attack. I replayed it over and over each time, to my surprise, making the same mistake. I finally forced myself to have more of a backup.

And I realized that I was living my life that way. I had very little in the way of backup. In my mind, it took away from whatever I was trying to do. "Why have savings? That money could be spent on my project!" It was a good lesson and I owe it to that moment, in that game.

There are many, many life lessons I have drawn from my youth spent playing poker semi-professionally. Perhaps the most consistently useful one was that, as mentioned in the article, one's performance should not be assessed purely on the outcome.

In poker, you can play perfectly and still lose. That is true in almost every field of life. Or, to give it more nuance, you can play exceptionally well and only win a little, whereas someone has had greater luck can play relatively poorly and win a lot.

There is another such game. Durak -- A russian game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durak

You should play 1v1 or 2v2.

The game involves random chance because of what cards you get.

The game involves strategy because of how you choose to attack and how you choose to defend, which can lead to major strategic advantages later on.

The game involves deception because your opponents can attack based on what you defend with, and when you lose the defense your opponent knows what weak cards you have. The goal is to give an impression of what strengths you have which are false.

Deception is definitely not the central focus of the game, but it helps. I noticed that someone skilled will typically win 7/10 games vs someone who is a novice.

This is a nitpick but maybe a slightly interesting one: in theory it's true that chess is not a "game" in this sense, but in practice it is not true. The "imperfect information" is all the paths that exist past the horizon of computation. When playing another human, that horizon is not very far away at all, so there is plenty of uncertainty. And it is absolutely possible to bluff to take advantage of a less well informed opponent, for instance by playing a move that may be less optimal, but is more likely to provoke a response that you know is bad but your opponent does not. At the very highest level this is less and less possible, and it does devolve into more of a computational exercise than a game, but I would argue that the same tactical constriction as skill improves exists in poker as well.

I tried this question with Dota: "What does Dota teach me about working with a software development team"

The only really big one I came up with is that some people are just toxic and you have to mute them and play around them as best as possible.

It's ironic that von Neumann said that poker isn't susceptible to computation while a few decades later, the game theory that he invented was used to create poker bots that are provably (within epsilon) unbeatable.

If you like Among Us, you should try Project Winter. Same concept but the game is more sophisticated in a few ways. (1) Everything is done by voice chat, which makes it a lot harder to fib. (2) The tasks and ways to sabotage are also more intricate than Among Us, which in that game are basically "click this button" whereas in Project Winter it involves crafting, going to the corners of the map (which is also a lot bigger) to find pieces, or combat. One of the tasks involves finding four digits across the map, so in that case it's very easy and effective to simply lie about which number you found and cause a lot of wasted time. (3) You can remove/kill anyone from the game but in Project Winter you don't know who was the imposter until the end of the game, so you're never certain how many are left.

An anecdote: I play a “home” online poker game with friends every Friday since quarantine started. It has been a great way to have some weekend fun and hangout (we zoom while we play). I love the “all-in” moments when you see the odds displayed for each hand and there’s still at least a turn/river left to watch. Watching the odds play out and seeing the occasional 3% chance win is so fun. I’d love to see odds annotations on more things, maybe it would be a cool AR feature.

The advantage of games is that you can combine unbiased evaluation, the opportunity of a short cycle and minimal cost (mostly time).

Most superior mammals are learning by playing for a reason.

It's been interesting to see how popular "Among Us" has become. (I guess the problem for me is that, ahem, it's best played with a group of friends...) It does seem to make for a good game on Twitch, since several streamers can play together or with their chats.

"Among Us" seems to be displacing the previous game "Town of Salem". Maybe people like the more real-time aspects? ("Among Us" also seems to inspire more "drama".) They're both in the "social deduction" genre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_deduction_game There's an old game called "Mafia" in the same genre. (I guess "Mafia-like" might be a bit ambiguous as the name of a genre.)

Now that human experience and Alpha Go have plotted out the playable variances in the first 40 moves, I still offer you this: you should play blitz chess.

Not being to find the best move leads to sub-optimal play which then offers tactical back-and-forth games. In my live games, I also try to use openings (e.g. Sicilian Najdorf, KIA) that reward sharp playmaking, inviting human error.

"Bluffing" in chess could be interpreted as "gambits": giving up material in exchange for attacking tempo/positional value. The bold bet is that despite your material disadvantage, you can still beat them before the game ends. "Deception" could be feinting a queenside push, only to position your army for a kingside endgame.

Was just thinking about the cultural effect of people who hold deception to be ethically better than violence, vs. those who accept occasional violence as a price. The authors preference for teaching deception over domination is an example. Such timing.

Maybe ten years ago I remember playing bluffing games like "Werewolf" and "Mafia" on IRC, where a bot would randomly assign you to be a wolf or resistance and you'd talk it up in the chat.

One Night Ultimate Werewolf capitalized on the "Old Spice Guy" ads and had Isaiah Amir Mustafa narrate in an app to facilitate in-person play.

Among Us is really just a continuation along this series of games -- except you actually have to go around a 2D map and complete toy tasks to accomplish a goal. If you're not into playing games, you can watch some folks on Twitch playing it to get a sense of how the dynamics work.

The best lesson I learned from poker is the concept of "expected value". [1]

It takes some of the grief out of undesired outcomes - because you made the right decision based on the information you had, and chance just happened to not be in your favor in this case.

It affects how I make all kinds of business- and life-decisions. Chosing insurance-package on the rental car, investing in stock, trusting people etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value

Among us is nothing new it’s a rehash of an old Starcraft 1 map mod called “The Thing,”

The idea was you had up to 8 marines and 1 was a zergling, stick together until the timer runs out to win.

Fun times. I miss those days.

Game theory fans may want to try a game invented by John Nash (and others) called So Long Sucker aka F* You Buddy! Gameplay consists of making - and breaking - alliances between players.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_Long_Sucker

An underappreciated fact about poker is how easy it is to get cheated.

Even professional poker players can get cheated out of a lot of money in a private game.[1]

It's even easier to cheat amateurs.

There are all sorts of methods cheats can employ, from having accomplices[2] to using marked decks[3] or other cheating paraphernalia about which most amateur players are absolutely clueless.

Cheating online is even easier... if you're the one running the poker servers. Online poker is like online voting. It's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63jgfmgqkO0

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cnQlz0ZHG4

[3] - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=marked+decks

Let me plug https://forum.mafiascum.net/ here, if you enjoy long games of mafia/werewolf with too much analysis going on

The funny thing is there are a lot of pro chess players that are really strong poker players not as much the other way around so chess lends to poker guess the author should start with chess.

The self-reporting strategy is easily countered by first voting off the person you're accusing, and then immediately you if that person turns out to be a crew member.

> In my experience if I talk confidently and get the first word in it's pretty easy to cast aside suspicion.

Do you usually play with friends? This is definitely not a stable strategy in the repeated Among Us game with the same players :) (although it is quite effective to start! Assuming nobody else is also using it.)

> Another strategy is to follow someone for a bit in the beginning, such that if you were the imposter you could've killed them, leading them to trust you. Then in voting sessions that person will likely vouch for you.

This is called being a “third impostor” (whenever there are two impostors in the round [0]) and it appears to be a little bit more stable, but then casts suspicion on you once you start leaving between kills, among other things. So it’s not fully stable, but some amount of randomness in your playing can also make this strategy viable. (I.e., doing the same when you’re both an impostor and a crew mate with nonzero probability.)

I almost always play the variant where we cannot know whether the person voted out was an impostor or not, so read the above with that in mind. The other variation (where voted players have their type revealed) one also has interesting meta-game strategies like “vouching,” where a player will say “if you vote red and they aren’t the Impostor, then immediately vote me.” This strategy is only exploitable as an impostor when they are close to a win, which makes it a very strong signal of truthfulness in the early game [1].

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[0] And is usually just called (n+1)th impostor whenever there are n impostors in a round.

[1] Impostors can exploit this in the late game, if the cooldown for emergency meetings is long-ish. For example: whenever an impostor pair is three kills away from a win, an impostor can kill (leaving two people for a win), self-report, and then vouch. Then the pair can just do a double kill and win immediately after the end of voting + cooldown.

There are several 'visual' tasks (medical scan, taking out trash, shields, shooting astroids) that allow's one to prove they are a ligitimate crewmember. Casting doubt on you as a 'self reporter'. Also things like the security camara's add even more dimensions to the game.

"In poker, you can play perfectly and still lose."

Only true over the short term: all you have to do is play GTO poker over an infinite number of hands in a rake free game and you should at least break even I think!

That said, this fact is the main reason that the game of poker really "works". If playing perfectly (or at least at a much higher level than your opponents) allowed you to always best your opponents, then you'd quickly find yourself out of opponents. There needs to be enough luck involved to keep losing players coming back to the table (the same reason most casino games have a thin house edge).

Poker can be an absolutely soul crushing game to play professionally. "Running bad" where you lose money over 10's or 100's of thousands of hands even while playing well can make you seriously question your sanity. It can also cause you to add subtle (or not so subtle) errors into your game (e.g. playing too cautiously or aggressively) which can turn your once winning game into a losing game, making it tough to decide whether you are currently a winning player running bad, or actually a losing player.

I was a professional poker player in another life and I agree; learning not to be result-orientated is one of the biggest life-lessons it thought me. Deciding to flip a coin for money where you get paid 3x your bet if you win, as long as you can afford to lose half of the time, is correct, regardless of outcome.

The other one is not being afraid of "tough" decisions - often, decisions are tough because all options are close in value. The closer their value is, the less it matters to choose the "correct" path, keeping in mind the future is unknowable and we always have imperfect information.

Yeah, that's a really fundamental and important insight.

The way I like to think about it is that whenever you face uncertainty, your actions might seemingly be proven wrong in retrospect, but may still have been correct based on your past knowledge.

That's undoubtedly correct, but I find it sometimes difficult to apply, since there's always the possibility that you could have overlooked important information, or that you are using that logic as an excuse. In poker, different from real life, you always know exactly what you know and what you don't know.

I like this comment and I learned the same lessons from golf and poker. Pay attention to the process and what you can control. As long as you make emotionless decisions and execute the process you shouldn't worry about the outcome. In fact the pressure of competing comes from the expectations you put on yourself by worrying about the outcome before you finish executing the process.

There is also an interesting life analogy that I like : During a tournament, an often underestimated skill is choosing your table (and thus your opponents).