There is a fantastic blog post by Ross Rheingans-Yoo about the shortcomings of poker as a tool to teach trading and why Figgie is a better one. https://blog.rossry.net/figgie/
He also wrote an equally brilliant eulogy about Max Chiswick, one of his colleagues, who helped him develop it. https://blog.rossry.net/chisness/
Beautiful eulogy. I don't know the author nor the eulogized but reading the eulogy made me appreciate people like those two (poker players, options traders, sports gamblers etc).
I often see in HN comments about how trading and Wall St in general is evil - when I feel completely the opposite. The two inventors of Figgie may not have contributed directly to curing cancer, saving the dolphins or the whales - dare I posit that most of tech building enterprise JIRA-esque todo-lists, e-commerce middleware and ad trackers don't either.
What I love about their friendship is that I see poker/gambler-mindset of always going for it, shoving the chips to the middle of the table when the pot-odds are good and it is a +EV play. I think they went all-in on several projects such as Figgie, AI Poker and teaching - seemingly all without the whole LinkedIn life coach-advised manner of building up your brand, client-base etc.
The older I get, I find more value too in the honesty of finance and trader types. Yes trading is about money but being honest about that is ironically one of the most altruistic things that can happen for a person. I find that most traders and gamblers who become aware of their greed and selfishness in their work - ironically also causes them to be very generous and selfless people in life due to their constant awareness of that limitation; and to also have zero fox given about what other people think of them professionally and socially (vs. in tech nowadays).
As an options trader/gambler, I'm thankful for the author's eulogy and their efforts in inventing the game. It's a bittersweet story. I read from the eulogy that Max Chiswick embraced the variance of life. Their friendship albeit short and sweet for me is like a fat right tail call option - the holding period might've only been a year and change - but the payoff is one that enriches the soul for life.
I often see in HN comments about how trading and Wall St in general is evil
Trading is one of the least evil things that goes on on Wall Street. Starting wars for profit (e.g., Blackwater) and buying additional houses as investments (as private equity firms do) and making massive job cuts while posting record profits, are all evil. I loathe capitalism but I agree that quants and traders are some of the least compromised people, whereas “change the world” techies and now techzis are the worst. Traders are, as you said, honest about their motivations.
Ultimately there is no ethical production or consumption in a system as rotten as ours, and everyone has to make a choice. Graveyards are full of moral people, and country clubs are full of humanity’s absolute worst. And if one has children, the argument can be made that failing to provide for them is ethically worse than taking a job within capitalism so long as one isn’t directly harming anyone.
Worth noting the author's retraction of the figgie post mentioned, which he makes in the eulogy post:
"Put that way, I was (and am) convinced that my original post was arguing against a strawman . I had never actually played the kind of poker that would make a fair comparison!"
I play poker. It really takes thousands of hours to understand the game from a strategic point of view. Then when you have a few very good players, maybe you can start talking about psychology.
Wow, just read through the eulogy and dug up some further links to explore, by Max Chiswick. Some really amazing content developed by these two, but never widely circulated.
The cabal at Jane Street keeps getting dirtier and nastier. For those of us who happen to have known them from their ivy league days at MIT and Harvard on to predictably careers at JS, HRT or Five Rings, no surprises here.
They all 1)ran student clubs, often time starting their own if they had to, but couldn't care less about the mission or welfare of the group, just so it'd be show leadership skills. They all 2) swore allegiance to Effective Altruism mental without ever volunteering a minute to any worthy cause, most interestingly, 3)interbred only among themselves, possibly because they're too smart to associate with other students.
I find it amazing just how just a few firms on Wall Street seem to fish out all sorts of sociopaths right of ivy league grads. SBF(MIT), R-Yoo brothers (Harvard), happen to have made it to the news so far, but there are new generations coming right behind them - just look for Effective Altruism on their LinkedIn profile.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/business/ftx-sbf-modulo-c...
This reminds me of how I got my first job in trading.
They had all the candidates going around doing various gimmicks like mental arithmetic. But one of the things we had to do was a trading game where you had to get a set of some commodity by trading your cards with other candidates. So just a screaming pit of kids trying to declare what they wanted to swap for.
I got dealt a ridiculously good hand, and all I had to do was wait for a couple of people to give me the missing two or three cards.
Once I started, poker was the game the bosses had us play. It seemed like a 10 quid subsidy from the head trader every day, I just had to wait around until he decided he'd played enough and went all in on what was always a crappy hand.
That essay about why poker probably isn't the best game for traders is pretty good btw. But there was a golden age of online poker going on at the time, and you could sit there with 5 tables open if you wanted.
I like the design of the game, having looked at it superficially. It's basically a market for cards, with what seems like a goal for collecting the right suit.
> But one of the things we had to do was a trading game where you had to get a set of some commodity by trading your cards with other candidates. So just a screaming pit of kids trying to declare what they wanted to swap for.
This is Pit, right? I remember it from an Aaron Brown book. Always wanted to try it!
Yeah something like that. There wasn't time to explain anything complicated, just the basic "swap one card at a time with whoever, let me know when you have a set"
1. If I have an obvious skew in the distribution of cards I've been dealt, I can assume the common suit and hence the goal suit and try to buy the cards of that suit.
2. If the distribution of cards I have is more or less even, then I just save that round and try to make back the base cost.
The hard part has been trying to understand how to update my beliefs based on the trades being made. If you assume everyone is making the rational choice, you might be able to come up with some strategy, but if its against humans who might be trying to bluff, I have no idea. Although, they say its a win-win game, so maybe theres a way there too.
Another way of playing is just simple buy low sell high without considering the goal suit. The reward for this style of playing isn't as high as correctly deducing the goal suit, but it's adequately successful. I think this is similar to market making: no matter how the market moves, the market maker makes a small amount of money regardless.
A better strategy would be to estimate card value based on your starting hand (i.e., probability that each suit is goal suit). It requires some non-trivial combinatorics but I guess if you take the game seriously you just memorize those once. Then you buy cards if the price are lower than your estimate and sell if it is higher. You also should pay a somewhat more for the card that gives you majority (4th/5th).
The updates are in this case, at least assuming others are doing something similar, is to increase expected price if you see sell for higher price and reduce if you see the sell for lower price. To figure out how much to update would be the hard part.
I downloaded the app to try it. It's interesting, appears that you can join a game with other players? I see two tabs: "4 starting" and "12 active" But clicking on these had no effect until suddenly the overflow broke rendering.
I am fascinated by this app mostly because it has a recruiting message at the bottom from Jane Street. I've never seen that before.
But, it's also interesting because it is one of the more poorly designed apps I've seen. It's react native when you check out the logs using adb. I bet this was a side project from a Jane Street employee. They did their best.
Interesting, works fine for me on both mobile and web. I am sure there are bugs in it but of the few games I played it worked fine though I imagine live is a much better experience when it comes to live bidding.
But overall this is a fairly common recruiting tool for firms like this, Jane Street is a definite outlier in how proactive they are but its not out of the norm for these this type of top tier org.
Given that Jane Street's prowess is in OCaml, I'm more inclined to give them grace when trying to release a React Native app. RN is one of those languages/frameworks that is both very easy to get into and also incredibly difficult to make a polished app.
RN barely works even if you're an experienced JS dev.
Something is just messed up with it, maybe it's fixed now but 2 weeks ago I tried to build an Expo app and the default template just doesn't build on android. Known issue on GitHub.
Everything is jerryrigged together. Flutter is what RN should of been, but Google doesn't seem to really care about it. Why one company needs multi cross platform frameworks, with multiple languages... I'll never know.
This game seems like it shouldn't work playing one-off games with no money on the line. How do you win in that context - by ending up with the most money at the end of the game? That would change the gameplay very significantly - a strategy that has you end with $1000 one time in three and 0 the rest should be favoured over one where you end up with $300 every time.
Poker solves this with poker tournaments: everyone starts with say $10,000 in play money and plays until one player wins it all. Backgammon solves it with match play: two players play first to say 7 points. In both cases, additional complexity is introduced to the game as optimal strategy changes depending on the size of the bets relative to the players' stacks or the number of points remaining.
Backgammon is just about playable as a one-off without a cube, though not by serious players. A single hand of poker without wagering makes no sense at all. Figgie seems closer to poker than backgammon, based on my reading. But it's being presented as a game to play one-off with bots or strangers. What am I missing?
That's true, but it's not very fun. A series of hands in which you determine how heavily to invest allows strategy to control for randomness. A single-hand five-card-draw showdown is a single decision about which cards to replace, and is largely determined by the shuffle, and the single bit of strategy "how many cards did the people before me ask for".
Or let me practice against bots before going live.
Also the notice that my username was taken wasn’t clear (was in white) so i thought the app didn’t work until i learned my username was already taken by scrolling up and seeing the notice that didn’t stand out
Love this. I’d really like to play with real cards, but the uneven suit setup makes that tough as a party game unless the host sits out. I guess you could prepare a bunch of decks ahead of time. At 4 minutes a round you’d need maybe 10 decks for an hour of playing though. To even it out I guess you’d have 12? But that means you’d have more info about what’s likely in later rounds..
Hmm. Maybe I can nerd snipe some into making a deck sorter..
Maybe you could just shuffle a full deck and then peel off 12 cards. Probably better simulates the stock market, there's a good chance somebody is going to get totally screwed (the case where the top of the deck is predominantly one suit). I wouldn't want to play for money that way, but playing for fake money maybe?
You can easily set up the cards with two honest Players. Player 1 sorts and makes four piles S-C--H-D. Player 1 looks away, Player 2 puts 8/12 markers randomly on either the first two piles or the last two piles, then randomizes the piles (so Player 1 gets no information from the order).
The hard part is how to do the trading with real cards. You would have to structure/limit the trading a lot instead of the free-for-all that seems to be going on.
Readit News
He also wrote an equally brilliant eulogy about Max Chiswick, one of his colleagues, who helped him develop it. https://blog.rossry.net/chisness/
I often see in HN comments about how trading and Wall St in general is evil - when I feel completely the opposite. The two inventors of Figgie may not have contributed directly to curing cancer, saving the dolphins or the whales - dare I posit that most of tech building enterprise JIRA-esque todo-lists, e-commerce middleware and ad trackers don't either.
What I love about their friendship is that I see poker/gambler-mindset of always going for it, shoving the chips to the middle of the table when the pot-odds are good and it is a +EV play. I think they went all-in on several projects such as Figgie, AI Poker and teaching - seemingly all without the whole LinkedIn life coach-advised manner of building up your brand, client-base etc.
The older I get, I find more value too in the honesty of finance and trader types. Yes trading is about money but being honest about that is ironically one of the most altruistic things that can happen for a person. I find that most traders and gamblers who become aware of their greed and selfishness in their work - ironically also causes them to be very generous and selfless people in life due to their constant awareness of that limitation; and to also have zero fox given about what other people think of them professionally and socially (vs. in tech nowadays).
As an options trader/gambler, I'm thankful for the author's eulogy and their efforts in inventing the game. It's a bittersweet story. I read from the eulogy that Max Chiswick embraced the variance of life. Their friendship albeit short and sweet for me is like a fat right tail call option - the holding period might've only been a year and change - but the payoff is one that enriches the soul for life.
Trading is one of the least evil things that goes on on Wall Street. Starting wars for profit (e.g., Blackwater) and buying additional houses as investments (as private equity firms do) and making massive job cuts while posting record profits, are all evil. I loathe capitalism but I agree that quants and traders are some of the least compromised people, whereas “change the world” techies and now techzis are the worst. Traders are, as you said, honest about their motivations.
Ultimately there is no ethical production or consumption in a system as rotten as ours, and everyone has to make a choice. Graveyards are full of moral people, and country clubs are full of humanity’s absolute worst. And if one has children, the argument can be made that failing to provide for them is ethically worse than taking a job within capitalism so long as one isn’t directly harming anyone.
Deleted Comment
so thats an easy rebuttal to keep in the back pocket
"Put that way, I was (and am) convinced that my original post was arguing against a strawman . I had never actually played the kind of poker that would make a fair comparison!"
I was reading about him and his peculiar approach to eating only a couple of months ago.
May his work on poker live on.
https://aipokertutorial.com/
https://poker.camp/aipcs24/1kuhn_reading.html
They all 1)ran student clubs, often time starting their own if they had to, but couldn't care less about the mission or welfare of the group, just so it'd be show leadership skills. They all 2) swore allegiance to Effective Altruism mental without ever volunteering a minute to any worthy cause, most interestingly, 3)interbred only among themselves, possibly because they're too smart to associate with other students.
I find it amazing just how just a few firms on Wall Street seem to fish out all sorts of sociopaths right of ivy league grads. SBF(MIT), R-Yoo brothers (Harvard), happen to have made it to the news so far, but there are new generations coming right behind them - just look for Effective Altruism on their LinkedIn profile. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/business/ftx-sbf-modulo-c...
They had all the candidates going around doing various gimmicks like mental arithmetic. But one of the things we had to do was a trading game where you had to get a set of some commodity by trading your cards with other candidates. So just a screaming pit of kids trying to declare what they wanted to swap for.
I got dealt a ridiculously good hand, and all I had to do was wait for a couple of people to give me the missing two or three cards.
Once I started, poker was the game the bosses had us play. It seemed like a 10 quid subsidy from the head trader every day, I just had to wait around until he decided he'd played enough and went all in on what was always a crappy hand.
That essay about why poker probably isn't the best game for traders is pretty good btw. But there was a golden age of online poker going on at the time, and you could sit there with 5 tables open if you wanted.
I like the design of the game, having looked at it superficially. It's basically a market for cards, with what seems like a goal for collecting the right suit.
This is Pit, right? I remember it from an Aaron Brown book. Always wanted to try it!
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/140/pit
Deleted Comment
The basic strategy that works for me:
1. If I have an obvious skew in the distribution of cards I've been dealt, I can assume the common suit and hence the goal suit and try to buy the cards of that suit.
2. If the distribution of cards I have is more or less even, then I just save that round and try to make back the base cost.
The hard part has been trying to understand how to update my beliefs based on the trades being made. If you assume everyone is making the rational choice, you might be able to come up with some strategy, but if its against humans who might be trying to bluff, I have no idea. Although, they say its a win-win game, so maybe theres a way there too.
The updates are in this case, at least assuming others are doing something similar, is to increase expected price if you see sell for higher price and reduce if you see the sell for lower price. To figure out how much to update would be the hard part.
I am fascinated by this app mostly because it has a recruiting message at the bottom from Jane Street. I've never seen that before.
But, it's also interesting because it is one of the more poorly designed apps I've seen. It's react native when you check out the logs using adb. I bet this was a side project from a Jane Street employee. They did their best.
But overall this is a fairly common recruiting tool for firms like this, Jane Street is a definite outlier in how proactive they are but its not out of the norm for these this type of top tier org.
Something is just messed up with it, maybe it's fixed now but 2 weeks ago I tried to build an Expo app and the default template just doesn't build on android. Known issue on GitHub.
Everything is jerryrigged together. Flutter is what RN should of been, but Google doesn't seem to really care about it. Why one company needs multi cross platform frameworks, with multiple languages... I'll never know.
Poker solves this with poker tournaments: everyone starts with say $10,000 in play money and plays until one player wins it all. Backgammon solves it with match play: two players play first to say 7 points. In both cases, additional complexity is introduced to the game as optimal strategy changes depending on the size of the bets relative to the players' stacks or the number of points remaining.
Backgammon is just about playable as a one-off without a cube, though not by serious players. A single hand of poker without wagering makes no sense at all. Figgie seems closer to poker than backgammon, based on my reading. But it's being presented as a game to play one-off with bots or strangers. What am I missing?
There are a lot of variations of poker. Playing single hands of, for example, five card draw makes sense without wagering.
Give me one button and throw me into a live game.
Or let me practice against bots before going live.
Also the notice that my username was taken wasn’t clear (was in white) so i thought the app didn’t work until i learned my username was already taken by scrolling up and seeing the notice that didn’t stand out
Hmm. Maybe I can nerd snipe some into making a deck sorter..
You can easily set up the cards with two honest Players. Player 1 sorts and makes four piles S-C--H-D. Player 1 looks away, Player 2 puts 8/12 markers randomly on either the first two piles or the last two piles, then randomizes the piles (so Player 1 gets no information from the order).
The hard part is how to do the trading with real cards. You would have to structure/limit the trading a lot instead of the free-for-all that seems to be going on.
2. Sort them to follow a repeating pattern of 4 distinct suits, e.g. ♥♦♣♠♥♦♣♠♥♦♣♠...
2. Cut the deck, putting the top part under the bottom part
3. (The deck will still have that pattern, but shifted by an unknown amount)
4. Counting out from the top, remove the following cards:
- 1st, 5th, 9th, 13th
- 2nd, 6th
- 3rd, 7th
Or: take 3, skip 1, take 3, skip 1, take 1, skip 3, take 1
Each of these groups will be of the same suit, so the deck should have the figgy distribution.
I guess either works though. For speed you would likely want the players to help either sort by suit or sort by a 4 suit pattern.
Person 2 enters the room, shuffles the boxes, leaves the room.
Person 1 re-enters the room and picks a box.
I guess Person 2 could run some simple validations of what Person 1 initially did.
Then again, Person 2 could have also replaced all of Person 1s decks with their own.