Thomas Luechtefeld

logic >> math. Understanding the math is important if you're building a bot where you can leverage a ridiculously powerful computer.

Using anything but extremely basic math while actually playing will more likely mess you up than help you. I even see people using the math all wrong when analyzing hands away from the table all the time. The popular concepts of how to apply GTO are usually laughably incorrect.

This is coming from a person who uses a lot of math.

A little off topic but since I haven't found the message feature I guess I'll post this here.

I developed an algorithm for portfolio optimization using a machine learning method and a common optimization method. I have run my own portfolio with it for the last 6 months and gotten ~25% return with variance comparable to the DJIA. Just for some background, I have a degree in math and physics and am pursuing a PhD in bioinformatics. I know a good amount about machine learning, but have only been dabbling in the market for about a year.

Now several of my math/programming oriented friends are interested in building a fund and web application out of my stock market project. I am curious what your impression is on the value of this kind of endeavor. Are small funds run by math/physics/computer science people (non market specialists) a feasible venture? Are there good places we can look to get corporate support? Should we even look for that support? There are about 5 of us and we all have a good amount of experience with machine learning and web application building, but 3 of us are pursuing PhD's and 2 of us currently have jobs so unless something major changed I wouldn't expect anybody to be working full time.

As far as giving up on traveling and being your own boss, I can see that being a significant detractor. But a couple years shouldn't be a big deal in that regard.

I played poker while doing my undergraduate degree and considered the same things you are considering. I have taken a step back from poker since black friday and am now in a Bioinformatics PhD program which I love. Obviously I wouldn't have had this opportunity if I hadn't completed the undergraduate.

For me it was fairly obvious that the stuff I was learning in undergraduate wasn't particularly difficult to learn without paying $40,000 a year, and that was the most compelling argument to leave. However the sad truth is that you shut a lot of doors by not completing a degree. People can regard you as a genius, but if you don't have a bachelors many institutions just cannot hire you.

If your degree is something like mechanical engineering (I did a math physics dual degree) then you are doing yourself a huge disservice by not completing it. When I was graduating I was convinced I would never want to work in academia or in a large corporation (where signalling with things like degrees is the most important). Lo and behold 4 years later I am doing bioinformatics and loving it. Something I could not be doing if I had not finished that degree.

So yeah, the obvious choice as most people here are mentioning is to finish the degree.

I like a lot of what you wrote here. However something that always worried me was the timing of these kind of mini-epiphanies. If your results are suffering and you know you need to change something you are likely to start trying new things. Unfortunately it is during these periods of change that I think we are most susceptible to learning biases.

I always caught myself saying "oh good, I'm changing things. I played that hand differently than I used to play it, that must be a good thing." And then rationalizing all kinds of reasons why my new strategy is better than my older strategy. Not really going anywhere with this, guess I'm just saying be careful with the "I'm going to play good from now on, and the only reason I was losing before was because I was playing badly" psychology.

meant to say where he is gauranteed to *win the tournament not join.

Also of course if one player with a positive ROI joins your tournament it will bring down your ROI.

But his entry changes the ROI's of all the players in the tournament.

as more clones of this player enter the tournament the roi of the entering clones will go to 0 and your roi will remain positive (assuming your expected roi against the clone is positive).

Also I guess you would have to consider things like table draws. If some player joins a tournament where he is gauranteed to join the tournament. He may help your winrate a lot if you could somehow gaurantee that you are not at his table until the final table. But that would fall under phil's "The only way for it to help your winrate is if the new player somehow brought the ROI of the other players down more than his own positive ROI."

This is not a trivial question. Skill and winrate are dependent on things like position and number of players.

I was never a great heads up player, but being good at 6max means that my relative winrate might actually go up when another player joins a 2 person table.

This can happen even if that new player has a positive expected win rate against me at the 3 person table, just so long as my winrate against the 1st player increases by a larger amount. Similarly a player can join a table and increase my expected returns against the other players by changing my relative position against those other players.

Perhaps this argument falls under 'stylistic differences aside' and for tournaments the same kind of argument doesn't apply. But I do think its relevant to the question when applied to cash games.