The response has been overwhelming. I think we’ve got over 7 million poker hands already. (For those of you who sent hands, but don’t have your Freakonomics book and t-shirt yet, be patient, they are coming, but we haven’t been able to keep up with the back orders.)
Other than being buried in data, my only problem is that everyone who is sending in hands is a good player! This makes sense. If you aren’t a good player, you tend to quit. So the majority of people who amass huge hand histories are winning players. Also, I suppose it is more satisfying to send your hand histories to me if you are poker star than a poker dud.
But to really tell the good players from the rotten, I need some more losers!
Just to show that I am serious, I started playing online poker a few weeks ago, and tracking my hands. I’m determined to make it to 10,000 hands so I can be a data point in my own study, no matter how much it costs me.
So if you are as bad as me at poker, or know someone like that, please send them to www.pokernomics.com. My initial look at the data makes me think that I can give players (especially bad players!) some useful insights on how to do better.
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Isn’t this selection bias? Bad poker players stop playing. People who start out bad but have the perseverance (and money) to keep playing, inevitably will improve — or, go broke, and end up in the first category.
I’m a pretty bad poker player (I like to think unlucky), but unfortunately I haven’t tracked my hands. Maybe if I had, I’d have become a better player. Oh well.
Now I don’t know about winning/loosing hands, but it seems to me that online poker might lead into a very freakonomic realm: the development of Artificial Intelligence. Computers are good at calculating odds, counting cards better than Rain Man, say. But they’re not good at chatting across the table. If a computer ever passes the Turing test (a program that can converse in a manner indistinguishable from a human) you better believe it’ll be playing poker online.
It seems to me that this would be a good application of a modern computational experimental approach, like genetic programming. It would be pretty straightforward to breed a variety of bad poker-playing agents, to offset the selection bias mentioned above.
Hi Steven -
Unfortunately (for you), my own hand history DB won’t help. But thought I might point you to the old IRC hand history info. Those games were significantly better than today’s medium and low limit play for real money and Michael Maurer created a huge database of hands.
http://games.cs.ualberta.ca/poker/IRC/
Good luck
That’s a tough challenge. You need to find a body of people who are interested enough in online poker to track their hands, are wealthy enough to play losing poker for over 10,000 hands, and yet are drawn by the lure of a free T-shirt.
Anyone willing to drop the money on tracking software is probably already a decent player. What ways are there to get crap players to start tracking their hands? Joint promotion with Poker Tracker? – Buy Poker Tracker at a bargain price of $35; submit your first 10,000 hands to the Freaks and get a chance to win an ipod (everybody loves ipods right?)
Funny that when you started promoting this, the first reaction of many people was that good players would never give away their databases.
angryman: what about free online poker sites? If Freakonomics becomes their “partner” — and, the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy says “your information won’t be shared with third-parties, only partners” (ha, ha) — then you could get a fair sample of winning, and losing, players and their hand records.
But, then there’s another selection bias: people who play poker for free, instead of for real money.
Free poker will give skewed results… You always play different when playing for matchsticks than when playing for dollars.