Nate Silver: evaluation

Transcript context

…Do you think some of the other people do it too? Yes. You can tell there’s a certain look. You see people are looking up at the clock, and it looks like they’re daydreaming, and they’re waiting for a number. You can rotate your cards. One thing people didn’t realize until they actually solved the Nash equilibrium for poker is how many mixed strategies there are. Basically, every hand is a mix of some kind. The flip side to that is that if you have any tell or read on your opponent at all, you move from literal indifference toward a dominant strategy in that context. So, I believe actually reading players’ tells, picking up on the moment, and how you are perceived and how your table image shifts a lot. But no, poker has gone further than anything else in the literal manifestation of game theory in real life. You also see it in football and things like that. I’m working on an NFL model now. I wonder if NFL teams are optimally mixing up their strategies, for example, but you see it there. A draw play on third and long, has a higher expected value because it’s not expected and because you’re supposed to always pass there. Economics is amazing in the sense that it predicts human behavior, I think, fairly well when you have repeated trials and people that have good feedback and incentive to be optimal. Your ability to read tells — does it help you at all in real life? And if so, how?…

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