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Jane Street's Figgie card game
- ewuhic 2y agoUpvote to comments ratio: nobody knows how to play, hadn't even heard before, but it has "nerdy corpo" attached to it, so must be good.
- tabarnacle 2y agoProjection?
- mistercheph 2y agoWhat exactly is being projected, and from where onto what?
- colesantiago 2y ago> Upvote to comments ratio: nobody knows how to play, hadn't even heard before, but it has "nerdy corpo" attached to it, so must be good. Correct, it’s the first trap us nerds make when corpos make “puzzles” to rope in future engineers to make lose their soul in immoral challenges like finance. When the FAANG jobs boom fizzles over due to the shift to AI, we will see more engineers compromise to finance as a way to make FAANG level salaries. We just don’t like to admit it, instead we like nerd games like this. This is the finance recruitment marketing machine to entice future engineers to lose their soul to make obscene amounts of money doing the most morally bankrupt actions against humanity.
- yeeetz 2y agohows quantitative finance more morally bankrupt than being an engineer in oil/gas, defense industry, etc.
- LPisGood 2y agoOr data harvesting, or making games with addictive micro transactions, or…most industries.
- colesantiago 2y agoMost industries don't make billions of dollars betting on the demise of other industries and also not giving anything back to society. Traders, private equity, hedge funds fall in this bucket.
- filoleg 2y ago> not giving anything back to society. > Traders, private equity, hedge funds fall in this bucket. How do you think the money in 401k, pension funds (government, teachers, etc.), S&P500, and any other financial instruments typically relied on by all sorts of average people grow? Do you think they appear out of thin air by the magic will of the market? Or maybe there is some mechanism through which efficient price discovery happens in a way that benefits both the average people utilizing common investment vehicles and those who actively manage/administer those?
- colesantiago 2y agoAnd? There is a difference between making staggeringly unhealthy amounts of money in days, than making money slowly over decades. Traders do next to nothing and are able to acquire this relatively quickly and not give anything of value back. If your idea of placing your money in a pension fund and locking it up for 40 years and only then you are 60+ years old able to use it a way of giving back to society. Then you might as well say you’ve been scammed of your time slaving away only to enjoy that money when you have little time left. Every employee with a pension is praying for their pensions to go up continuously for decades, traders can bet both ways of the market and still end up rich. One recession and you’ll get a lot of disillusioned employees whose pensions are worth less than they put in years ago.
- LPisGood 2y agoThe blog post linked in the top comment itself is very well written though. I had assumed poker was a good game to teach traders to play and the counterpoints were insightful.
- vessenes 2y agoLove 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..
- notpushkin 2y agoSort the deck ino 4 stacks by suit, have somebody else remove the cards without looking at the suits, shuffle stacks back into a deck.
- vessenes 2y agoYes. I think you’d want half the players to watch the stack placement and half the removal and rearrangement. Lots of incentive to peek.
- The_Blade 2y agoI get that Diplomacy feeling where if you pull off cheating, good, it's part of the game. Like insider trading, or when I'd play the banker in monopoly and sleight-of-hand. Ledgerdemain, if you will
- philipwhiuk 2y agoPerson 1 enters the room, makes a bunch of decks and puts them in boxes. Leaves the room. Person 2 enters the room, shuffles the boxes, leaves the room. Person 1 re-enters the room and picks a box.
- lightbendover 2y agoPerson 1 made every deck exactly the same way though. 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.
- lewiscarson 2y agoThere 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/ 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/ https://blog.rossry.net/chisness/
- matt_daemon 2y agoWow, that’s sad about Max Chiswick. I was reading about him and his peculiar approach to eating only a couple of months ago. May his work on poker live on.
- pinkmuffinere 2y agoHis peculiar approach to eating??? Wow I need to hear about this. I’ll Google, but do you have any recommended articles?
- sebg 2y agohttps://chisness.substack.com/p/automate-the-food https://chisness.substack.com/p/automate-the-food
- oidar 2y agoVery sad. Max wrote about optimizing nutrition and cited a satire piece about over-optimization ruining someone's life. Then, ironically, he died from malaria while traveling—despite having donated to malaria prevention. Life defies our attempts to control it.
- lovich 2y agoIs this satire or was he a conspiracy theorist? It didn’t take very long into the article before he started talking about “seed oil infiltration”. My eyes rolled into the back of my head and I was unable to continue reading any more of the article after that
- xrd 2y agoI 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.
- _fat_santa 2y agoGiven 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.
- 999900000999 2y agoRN 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.
- xrd 2y agoI agree about RN. But not about flutter. I just used aider to code a brand new flutter app from scratch. It has Google login. And a webview on a second screen. It looks gorgeous and is performant. And deploying it to my android device from within the aider session worked flawlessly.
- 999900000999 2y agohttps://techcrunch.com/2024/05/01/google-lays-off-staff-from-flutter-dart-python-weeks-before-its-developer-conference/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/01/google-lays-off-staff-from... Google did a major cut to its flutter team last year. It's a great framework, I've used it for several projects. But I doubt it's future...
- dmurray 2y agoThis 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?
- pclmulqdq 2y agoIt's Jane Street. If two people haven't played this game for $10,000, I would be very surprised.
- philipwhiuk 2y agoTheir version of Liar's Poker.
- philipwhiuk 2y agoI would bet that at Jane Street they absolutely do put money on the line when playing internally.
- dfxm12 2y agoA single hand of poker without wagering makes no sense at all. There are a lot of variations of poker. Playing single hands of, for example, five card draw makes sense without wagering.
- JoshTriplett 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nsarafa 2y agoWhy not use your own characters or companies to trade? Would be way more fun having some mascots to trade instead of common cards
- gruez 2y agoThe game mechanics require 2 colors that each contain 2 suits. Playing cards fits this requirement, are widely available, and importantly everyone knows what the suits/colors are. The same isn't true if you used random companies or game characters.
- infecto 2y agoWhich is a good message that this type of role / career is not good for you. The excitement is in the winning, does not matter what is being traded as long as you win.
- nsarafa 2y agoThe whole choosing games thing is strange. 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
- programjames 2y agoI think it's because there's usually only a couple players at any given time, so live matching would never fill.
- AttakBanana 2y agoI've enjoyed playing this. 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.
- EvgeniyZh 2y agoA 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.
- AttakBanana 2y agoPretty much exactly what I meant.
- kccqzy 2y agoAnother 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.
- AttakBanana 2y ago
- lordnacho 2y agoThis 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kqr 2y ago> 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! https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/140/pit https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/140/pit
- lordnacho 2y agoYeah 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"
- colesantiago 2y agoWhile this is a fun intellectually stimulating nerd toy for engineers, trading just doesn’t make sense to me. Making massive sums of money from bad policies of governments, shorting companies or even entire countries and making money from wars by shorting and longing commodities is a repugnant way of making money and is immoral. This is no better than crypto trading and gambling.
- arduanika 2y ago> trading just doesn’t make sense to me Skill issue. Let me if I can help. Look up "price discovery" and try to understand how it's a service to the world. > bad policies of governments... wars... What's wrong with helping the markets react calmly and accurately to these events? Is a surgeon evil for treating a tumor, or a farmer for addressing your hunger? > This is no better than crypto trading and gambling Crypto is subject to much debate, but gambling does nothing to help with efficient markets, liquidity, or capital formation. It's strictly worse than trading actual assets.
- colesantiago 2y ago> What's wrong with helping the markets react calmly and accurately to these events? Is a surgeon evil for treating a tumor, or a farmer for addressing your hunger? Great Strawman. A surgeon is more morally good than a trader or hedge fund waiting to short companies to profit from their demise, or it's cousin the private equity industry buying up shares to take over companies and laying people off to make a profit. You seem to have already forgotten it was these people that caused the 2008 crash with scandals (Look up the LIBOR scandal to remind you) not surgeons or farmers. > Crypto is subject to much debate, but gambling does nothing to help with efficient markets, liquidity, or capital formation. It's strictly worse than trading actual assets. I don't think that SPACs, GameStop and other hundreds of unprofitable companies IPOing in the 2010s to 2022s were efficient markets and lots of traders made billions out of them. A doctor or farmer as you describe have far more morals than these people, as traders and the finance industry make obscene amounts of money while doing this from their desks doing virtually nothing and contributing nothing to the industries and especially society. Wall Street has invaded tech and the reverse is happening already because the FAANG boom is now over.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago[dead]
- Kortaggio 2y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38679078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38679078
- sawxwkdm 2y agoSaddaow
- sawxwkdm 2y ago81877778ssal
- thx 2y agojust curious , if anyone knows — is this the same game played by FTX sam in that Michael Lewis crypto biopic ??
- philipwhiuk 2y agoI've not watched FTX's biopic - I think it's one Michael got wrong. But Michael Lewis is a Liar's Poker fan from his days at Salomon.
- thx 2y agowhat do you think he got wrong (in general or particularly) ?? not saying it was my favorite book but i did enjoy michael lewis’ description of the card game & such
- jldugger 2y agoWhich book? OP seems to be referencing _Going Infinite_ which is widely regarded as a bad take[1], while the card game you reference seems to be Liar's Poker, from Lewis' book of the same name. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_Infinite#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_Infinite#Reception
- _cs2017_ 2y agoDo people experience the frequent loss of part of the trading history when reviewing at round end on the browser version?
- jjallen 2y agoI looked at this. I don’t fully understand the game yet. One thing I do not like is the emphasis of speed. Humans should not be making fast financial decisions, trading or otherwise. Sure you could improve with this game. But you don’t have to be able to make fast decisions to be successful in finance.
- kqr 2y agoI feel the same, but I'm not intellectually convinced. You make up like half the ante in expectation on a random hand (on average dealt two cards of the goal suit, for 20 points against the ante of 40.) If you can find 4 trades with a 5 point spread profit you'll make the rest of the ante back. That's a full minute for each trade, i.e. not that stressful. What I do find stressful is how fast the bots react to obvious mispricings. If a player accidentally sells a card worth 8 points for 1 point the bots buy it before I even have a chance to see the offer! I could set a low limit bid on valuable suits to catch that, but the limits reset every time a trade happens, and I do not have the patience to enter the limit again. At least not on my phone -- might be easier on a computer with a real keyboard.
- 392 2y agoJust like real trading :')
- laidoffamazon 2y agoReading articles like this I feel like I have an intellectual disability. I can't make heads or tails of what the point of these kinds of trading-simulacra card games are, or even how they work.
- lavelganzu 2y agoFor in-person play with ordinary playing cards and an arbitrary number of players, keep the rules the same except: * Start with 1 deck per each 2 players. Shuffle the decks together. * Deal 10 cards to each player, & set ante at a constant 50 chips per player. * At the end-of-round reveal, the common suit is whichever suit has the most cards. If there's a tie, flip cards from the remaining deck until the tie is broken and the common suit is determined.