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Poker in the limelight

I was thinking recently about how poker becoming televised has affected the game. I don’t mean the community at large. Obviously that has changed a great deal. I never even knew of a professional poker circuit before ESPN started making a big deal out of the world series. The number of players and spectators is [...]

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Posted on July 18, 2008 by Secor | Filed Under Analysis, Celebrity, Philosophy, Poker, Poker Players, Tournaments, TV
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Blindsight and Betting: An Experiment by Persaud, McLeod and Cowey

Blindsight is a strange brain/mind condition that philosophers like to discuss in the context of discussions about consciousness. People with blindsight have a problem with their visual cortex, and as a result are “blind” in an area of their visual field, what is called a scotoma. Why do I put the word “blind” in quotation marks? It is because these blindsighted people claim [...]

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Posted on July 15, 2007 by Suber | Filed Under Philosophy, Poker, Science
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What Does it Mean if Computers are Better at Poker than Humans?

Poker is like real life. You have to make decisions on the basis of imperfect knowledge and you often have to bluff in order to achieve your goals. One might think that computers cannot do these things, or at least do these things as well as humans can. On July 23 and 24, we [...]

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Posted on July 11, 2007 by Suber | Filed Under Philosophy, Poker
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The Gambler’s Fallacy

In Poker and Philosophy: Pocket Rockets and Philosopher Kings, edited by Eric Bronson, and published by Open Court, there is an essay by Gregory Bassham and Marc Marchese titled “Don’t Play on Tilt! Avoiding Seven Costly Critical Thinking Errors in Poker“. As the title of the essay suggests, it is about seven types of [...]

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Posted on June 16, 2007 by Suber | Filed Under Philosophy, Poker
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Do Poker Players Need Soft Paternalism?

I read an interesting NY Times article by Jim Holt about a view called “soft paternalism,” the idea that you know what’s in your best self interest, but an external force, someone other than you (either the government or the private sector or your friends/family), will help you do it. The article made me think about whether [...]

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Posted on March 3, 2007 by Suber | Filed Under Government, Philosophy, Poker
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Marc Salem – potentially the best poker player who ever lived

You have to watch this video of Marc Salem. It is simply amazing what this guy can do in terms of reading peoples’ behavior. I am certain that he would make a phenomenal poker player, always knowing what other players are holding. There is a philosophical view called behaviorism. According to an unsophisticated version of the view, mental [...]

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Posted on January 21, 2007 by Suber | Filed Under Off the felt, Philosophy, Poker
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Poker and Philosophy: “Is it Bluffing when No One Sees you Blink?”

Is online poker really poker? This question is one that David R. Koepsell considers and gives an answer to in his essay “Is it Bluffing when No One Sees you Blink”, one of the essays in the collection of essays called ”Poker and Philosophy: Pocket Rockets and Philosopher Kings”, edited by Eric Bronson. To see my comments about another [...]

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Posted on December 11, 2006 by Suber | Filed Under Book Review, Online Poker, Philosophy, Poker
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