Archive for March 11th, 2010

We’re starting a new series on Poker Savvy Plus called Ask the Pros where members submit hands they’ve played for review by myself or one of the other PSP instructors. If you’re a member and have any hands that you found interesting or tricky, please send the hand history to chris@pokersavvy.com. Be sure to mention that you’d like your hand to appear in one of Foucault’s videos (unless you don’t want me to be the one to review it, in which case fine be that way but don’t tell me about it because it will hurt my feelings). And if you aren’t a member of  yet, this is a great reason to join Poker Savvy Plus now and get a 7-day free trial.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, who regularly contributes interesting and well-written little essays  to the New York Times Op-Ed page, writes today about four-way stops and what a surprisingly successful tidbit of human cooperation they are:

What a four-way stop expresses is the equality of the drivers who meet there. It doesn’t matter what you drive. For it to work, no deference is required, no self-denial. Precedence is all that matters, like a water right in Wyoming. Except that at a four-way stop on the streets of Rancho Cucamonga everyone gets to take a turn being first.

The underlying theme here is nothing less than the importance of  rational games playing to a functioning society. As poker players, we tend to focus on game theory’s competitive applications in zero-sum situations, but game theory is equally as applicable to cooperative interactions that realize non-zero-sum benefits. (For more on this subject, see my review of Robert Wright’s Nonzero.)

In fact, I just record a video for Poker Savvy Plus yesterday in which I used traffic lights as an example of a Nash Equilibrium. The really remarkable thing about the four-way stop is that it is largely self-governing, as opposed to the traffic light, where drivers obey orders from (literally) on high. Yes, there are rules for how to behave at a four-way stop, but their application in a particular situation are almost always left to the individual judgment of the drivers. There is no flashing light or other signal to tell you when it is your turn and when you must defer.  Read the complete post...