How I created the first NLHE solver and made $500k at age of 23

That's incredible, thank you so much. I'm fully on board with your philosophy regarding where value is to be found so it's great to hear you say it. I am under no illusions of being a world class securities analyst so although I buy stuff that is cheap, I never oversize a position because if something looks too good to be true, I tend to think it's more likely that I've missed or not fully understood something than that I've found a particularly large mispricing. That's why warrants appeal to me, because it feels like maybe there are things to be found where it's just clearly mathematically mispriced due to almost nobody having looked at it, rather than needing a judgement based on understanding the business prospects. I hadn't yet thought of an angle to start searching from though so your example is extremely useful. The last thing I've been doing is going through a list of South African stocks trading below book value to find any net nets to look into further haha but after that I'll find a long list of warrants and start looking for situations like the one you describe.

I hadn't considered the CFA exams too seriously because I don't have any plans to manage anyone else's money any time soon (if ever) but I'll take a more serious look thanks. I'll also give those books a read, I've read a couple from Joel Greenblatt and 1 or two others but not those ones.

Thanks again for the insight, it is very much appreciated. Best of luck to you in the markets and at the tables 😀

efficient market theorem/

^ Some financial markets are nowhere near efficient.

EMH is a bit like ICM in poker. It's a reasonable way to model things and helpful in some ways but some of the assumptions don't hold in the real world and so it has limitations. I don't want to explain either in detail but I'm comfortable in those conclusions.

lots of solid discussion so a bit random to pick this quote but:
"I'm sure they think the game is great these days because it suits their strengths, it's all just personal opinion I guess."

my impression from talking to a number (but not a HUGE number) of good players in general is that few people would say the game is 'better' these days, let alone confidently. i think good players these days mostly either prefer the game (but not think it's "better") because it suits them -as you said, or prefer how it used to be but just adapted (because they have to).

Super interesting, thank you for sharing.

An interesting question is at what point does it cross the line.

In the early days you have someone dealing out the cards to themselves and working out basic probabilities, HUD's providing huge amounts of data to refine and improve strategy, mass data collection that gave more huge insights, elite players studying together to all improve one another, early programs that calculated simples ranges/EV etc, modern solvers

These are all iterations of things people did to gain information that others playing the game lacked for an advantage. There was a time when it felt the balance of information had shifted to a very small part of the community and this thread has probably shown that to be true. These guys weren't that much better than the field but had information that everyone else didn't at the time. Solvers have flattened that playing field by democratising almost all information so anyone can reach whatever ceiling they have for the game with enough work.

The issue is that the game has lost almost all of the in game human brain solving that made it so attractive to many people. I think people do over romanticize this notion of missing the days when it was my wits against my opponents because it has always been the case that others are not only better in game but also more studied than others. The problem now is that it is weighted completely one-sided with little to no real time brain solving which makes the game far, far less interesting.

tbh with the advent of AI, this is inevitable for like... all games probably, especially strategy games where what's attractive is the puzzle to solve in real time, now we get all the solutions and just sort of replicate what we see

I find this a really unusual take about this 'solver era'. You can't just memorize solver outputs, no human can they are far, far too complex and its always odd when people act like studied players are just making the right moves ever time, only RTA cheaters are. You can very much do "brain-solving" though, and it is more so the case than pre-solver time I think.

If you liked the game more pre-solver (which personally, I also did, but only a little bit) then you like intuition, psychology + guesswork, not problem solving. Given nobody can memorize solver outputs, you are identifying trends + theories from data and problem solving them real time when trying to adapt them to similar.

Hello Laegoose,

Could you please estimate how difficult in your opinion it would be to solve this Pot Limit game (comparing to solving NLHE for example) ? Is solving a Pot Limit game more complex than a No Limit game ?

Here's the link to the rules thread - https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/15/po...

I'm not deep into the poker solving topic, I don't know much about it, so I was just wondering, thanks in advance ...

Fantastic thread, thanks for sharing!

great stuff laegoose, would short deck ever be a game u would explore in the future?

There have been private solvers for that almost since the games inception.