What makes poker a great game?

I recently did a talk at the NYU Game Center cleverly entitled “What Makes Poker So Awesome?” (Old school 2p2per ilya wrote up a nice blog post about it here.) The talk was originally intended for game designers, but some poker players on my Twitter feed requested that I put a copy online for the poker community/whoever to check out. So, I did.

It’s forty minutes of me talking about why poker is a game that’s interesting enough to study. If that sort of thing interests you, enjoy:

 

In completely unrelated news, I’ve been meaning for a while now to create a video explaining basic statistics that’s geared towards poker players. The goal would be to explain from first principles some really fundamental concepts that I think would be useful to people whose net worths depend heavily on coin tosses and deck shuffling and stuff: What the hell is variance? What the hell is the normal distribution? What the hell is the binomial distribution? How can I use these things to plan my life and play poker better? etc. At the very least, it should give me something to point to whenever someone asks me to make a new Life as a Poker Pro by the Numbers post–since those posts use mostly very basic statistics that poker pros should probably know themselves anyway.

I may or may not actually do that, and if I do, it may or may not be soon. So, if that sort of thing sounds particularly appealing to you, you might try bugging me on Twitter or something to put a little peer pressure on me to do that.

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