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Steve Levitt at the World Series of Poker
Here is one account, here is Levitt's account of another round. In the latest he did very well indeed. Out of 900 or so contestants, I am hearing reports that he finished about #25, some sources are saying as high as #10. The pointer is from Scott Cunningham, tell us more if you know more.
So how many dimensions does intelligence have? Some top chess players, such as Etienne Bacrot, are switching into poker for the higher pay, though I suspect Levitt's move is temporary rather than permanent.
Addendum: Here is Levitt's account.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 13, 2007 at 12:42 PM in Sports | Permalink
Comments
Note, that Levitt's account of his WSOP performance is for a different tournament - an earlier one this week. The link to PokerWorks has Levitt bubbling the final table of a different tournament - the $1.5k NLH Shootout. I was told it had a field of ~900 players, and Levitt went out around 10-25th (depending on the source). And, he went out in a total suckout scenario, where the guy he was headups against went all-in on the turn with a semi-bluff (Levitt had top pair with K-9), being basically a 75-85% favorite, and guy caught 1 of the 8 cards he needed to make a straight. How great had he made the final table of a WSOP tournament. Now that would've been lucrative - the payout from being at the final table plus however many extra books he would've sold! LOL
Posted by: scunning at Jun 13, 2007 1:01:44 PM
This was his tournament. Had he made it to the final table, he would've been playing against such pros as Daniel Negreneau and Erick Lundgren. That would've been so awesome to watch. I'm sure Phil Gordon would've been present sweating Levitt had that happened. Oh well.
Posted by: scunning at Jun 13, 2007 1:10:07 PM
Levitt went out in 25th (by sequence of when he busted from the event). The format of the tournament was a winner-take-all format, where each table played to a winner to advance to the next round. As he was eliminated as runner-up at his table, I would place him finishing 10th-18th.
Posted by: cc at Jun 13, 2007 1:31:56 PM
Re IQ, you can think of g as the baseline, with various specific skills up or down from that baseline. So high IQ helps everything, pretty much, unless you have a weakness in some specific skill area.
That said, I used to play a lot of Bridge, and the top players in the world are extremely smart (160+IQ) people, but some extremely smart people (tenured Math Profs, also 160+IQ) are not very good bridge players. Bridge is a timed event, and math is not; bridge also has a social/partnership component, and math does not. So specific skills are relevant to the arena.
Posted by: Tim Lundeen at Jun 13, 2007 2:54:35 PM
Alexander Grischuk has also been playing quite a bit of poker and he just this morning qualified for the chess World Championship tournament, after much speculation that he might have been lost to poker.
Posted by: John Goes at Jun 13, 2007 3:38:36 PM
It was a shootout, so there's no difference between tenth and 25th: everyone who makes the second table, but not the final table gets $6700. Levitt lost on a questionable play by a player headsup who ran into some luck; since the E(V) of the final table was $75k (perhaps less for Levitt, given the quality of the final table), that's got to be frustrating to lose to an eight-outer on the river after correctly calling a semi-bluff from a player who overplayed pre-flop, flop, and turn.
Posted by: Ted at Jun 13, 2007 4:12:29 PM
Twoplustwo thread on Levitt's loss.
Posted by: Ted at Jun 13, 2007 4:14:00 PM
That's why they call it gambling.....no matter what the movie Rounders has to say about it. Sometimes dumb moves pay off!
Posted by: Chicagoan at Jun 13, 2007 5:25:08 PM
Am I the only one that finds Levitt's egomania and the constant Freakonomics tubthumping tiresome?
Posted by: Rich Berger at Jun 13, 2007 6:49:38 PM
Fuller got lucky (he had a 18% chance of hitting the straight-had 8 outs in 44 cards), however, the play itself is not necessarily flawed. You do have to bluff sometimes, otherwise your good opponents will utilize more accurate information on your style. Fuller played the entire hand with the intention of bluffing Levitt at some point. Sometimes you get called when bluffing, and sometimes those calls are bad plays, too.
Posted by: Yancey Ward at Jun 14, 2007 11:28:06 AM
