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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The currently operating poker sites I have to imagine will keep their data secret at all costs. Are there any failed online poker rooms looking to salvage a few bucks? Surely among all the new entrants someone has gone belly up. Can you buy data at a bankruptcy sale?
The “online poker community” the people who read poker blogs, mags, websites, etc. is too good. It sounds like you need a bunch of newbies to do exactly what you’re doing – start playing now and get 10,000 hands. Jason is right that free poker is different from real poker, but only because people have no incentive to win. What about a contest for UofC students with a prize good enough that they will want to play well? Starting September 10, students have 2 weeks to play 10,000 hands at the lowest limit on Poker Stars (if memory serves, Stars has the smallest limits). Top 3 performers win an ipod, and everyone who submits gets entered into a draw for another ipod. Minimal financial risk for students, enough incentive that they won’t just play like idiots, and good players won’t bother competing because, as anyone who plays poker knows, all good players already have ipods. Promote it in the school paper.
Perhaps this is a little off topic, but the current issue of Wired Magazine has a very interesting story on pokerbots, online here. The title: “On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Bot”.
Winholdem (a pokerbot) has an interesting site here, with a forum.
what if bad poker players are what make people good?
Anybody who continues to play poker, even though they are lousy, is a hopeless romantic. Take the fact that all the data you are getting is from good players and run with it.
There is a big difference is playing technique between better than average players who show a tidy profit, and exceptional players who can make a living playing poker. Your research shoud be directed toward determining the difference between better than average players and great players.
Forget about the lousy players. Fortunately, there’s no hope for them.
I like the Freakonomics a lot. Forgive me for being naive. What is the point to promote the poker game, to me, it is a way of gambling?
Since I use a Mac, I play at pokerroom.com (Java applet) which does not save information in Poker Tracker’s format. I use MacPokerPro. Is there some tool to convert to Poker Tracker format out there? Or is there a place where the Poker Tracker format/API is published so that I can convert my hand history (10,000+ hands) myself and send it in?
Pokerbots will kill off online poker. Who wants to play against a machine? Certainly not a newbie. Can you imagine sitting down at a chessboard and facing Big Blue?
Probably the first program to pass the Turing Test will be a pokerbot. Now there’s a monetary incentive to beat the test!