Winners Will Continue to be Winners

Clément Sire, a Frenchman, has released a study that says he can determine anything from how long a tournament will last to figuring out his ranking all by looking at the size of his opponent’s fortunes. He says he uses physics and games to study poker player behavior, and the pattern that come out of the games because of it.

The Scientific American has released Sire’s results, and it says that by studying the other people at the table you can tell a lot from them – while playing Texas Hold’em. The statistical physicist and champion bridge player used his experience with physics as well as playing games to come to his logical results.

Sire works for the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics, at the University of Toulouse in France. He says he developed the theory in response to the idea that physicists were getting involved in predicting results of various gambling games. He says his work “Universal Statistical Properties of Poker Tournaments” was tested by his using real data from online gambling, specifically poker tournaments.

Poker is a good game to study because it is seen as this complex and mystical system, and its isolation makes it a good target. However, experts in his field say that Sire’s statistical research has shown that it is a much more accessible game.



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