Geeks Playing Poker?

Ben Collins writes "I recently won a satellite tournament at Full Tilt Poker for entry into the World Poker Tour Final at Foxwoods Casino. I picked up poker as a hobby about 4 months ago, and consider myself a decent player, maybe due to programming experience (analytical thinking). Any other programmers/computer people find that they can play poker better than the average person because of their computer experience?"

Many pros have a history in computers

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of the top pros had previous careers in computers:

Chris "Jesus" Ferguson - PhD in Computer Science from UCLA

Andy Bloch - Two degrees from MIT, once designed computer chips

Phil Gordon - degree in Computer Science from Georgia Tech

rounders quote

[greystreets]

Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker at your table in half an hour, you are the sucker.

Re:IMO

[gl4ss]

though.. if you yourself show zero changes.. which geeks are pretty good at after all(being not so emotional about such things as a stack of cards, playing cards that is)... and give ZERO effort into reading the body language might be faked for all you now anyways.

if you TRY to read and _fail_ then you _will_ lose. if you don't even try reading body language you can play as if you were online(hell, for the heck of it, develope a system of coming up with a random order of different 'signs', blinking eyes or twitching or whatever).

oh and one thing.. gamblers, really serious addicted gamblers, like to think they got some edge because of whatever reason, otherwise it would be harder for them to reason why they should keep playing even if doesn't make sense monetarywise(beause they are in fact losing). one of these legend edges is the reading of body language.

Three words...

[PFritz21]

Chris "Jesus" Ferguson. One of the best in the world. Has a Ph.D. in Computer Science. Uses his mathematical abilities quite often in the WSOP (World Series of Poker).

Wil Wheaton is an example

[devphil]

Given that the man taught himself Linux for the purposes of running his own website [wilwheaton.net], most of us would qualify him as intelligent.

I skim over his blogs about every other month, and recently he's taken up poker as a hobby. He's studied, practiced, etc, and blogs the stores of his experiences playing (LA, Vegas, and so on).

What have I learned by reading them? No, being smarter than the average person does not automatically make you a better poker player. Other things do.

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