Week 1 Problem Session: Getting started

The first Problem Session — no assignment is due yet, so it's spent agreeing on notation and working the week 1 example by hand together

22 February 2027

Before the session#

Read the week 1 lecture. Bring one folk poker claim of your own — something you’ve heard said with confidence at a table or in a strategy forum — that isn’t already on the list the lecture names.

In the session#

No problem set is due in week 1, so the time goes to notation and a shared worked example instead. Hand notation, range notation, and the equity/EV vocabulary introduced in lecture get fixed here, once, so that nobody spends week 4 unsure whether “equity” means the same thing two people mean by it.

Then the group re-derives the week 1 example — 22’s equity against a random hand — by hand, in miniature: not a full 300,000-trial simulation with pen and paper, but enough of a reduced version (a handful of representative opponent hands, a handful of representative boards) to see why a computed number, not a table thumb-rule, is the kind of answer this course is after.

The folk claims brought in from outside get sorted onto the same list the lecture started: which ones the semester’s syllabus will actually resolve, and which ones don’t have an obvious formal claim hiding inside them at all — which is itself a useful thing to notice about a piece of folklore.

Afterwards#

Nothing is marked this week. What should be settled going into week 2: shared notation, and a working sense of what turns an assertion into a computation.