The optimal strategy is reducing what other people know about what you know.
Poker, which illustrates the importance of an optimal strategy, is a game of imperfect information since so much is concealed. Solving the game of poker would not overcome the disadvantage of being unable to know why your opponent is acting as he or she is. Such strategy concepts derive from an abstruse field of applied mathematics called game theory, which was formulated, in the nineteen-forties, to address difficult economic problems.
Losers at poker tend to think that they didn't get the cards, and not that they were beaten by someone who played better than they did. They return to the table and wait for big hands and lose more. Accomplished players strive to diminish the effects of luck. From the pattern of their opponents' bets and behaviors, they work like detectives to determine their cards. They play opportune hands deceptively, and feckless ones, too, and shed unpromising ones before the cards cause them too much harm.
Games for which a flawless strategy is known are said to be solved. Tic-tac-toe is solved. Chess is not solved, and poker is not, either. Solutions theoretically exist; they are simply too intricate, so far, to be comprehended. Among mathematicians, chess is regarded as a game of perfect information, because nothing is hidden. If its ideal strategy were discovered, there would no longer be any reason to play it.
A game theory question posed by Claude Chevalley, in 1945, in View: "Each player being ignorant of the strategies followed by his opponents, which strategy will he follow in order to get the maximum possible advantage for himself." This means, when up against an expert opponent, "How do you lose the least?" is the key question to ask yourself according to Chris Ferguson who applies game theory concepts to grand-master poker and became known in 2000 as the first person to win a prize of more than a million dollars in a poker tournament. Part of it is mathematically determining whether one's cards are favorable, but a player using optimal strategy also builds into his play bets that sometimes appear improbable and make it mathematically difficult for the opponent to know what to do. The key is not let your opponent outplay you.
Ferguson says, "I learned poker by sitting at home and thinking how to play hands--if I play my hands this way, what can my opponent do to take advantage of me, and if he can, what do I need to do so that he can't anymore? I want to be the least exploitable player. Other people learn through experience, and if they're good they're going to come up with a strategy that's pretty similar to what I do. It turns out that there's just a right way to play. I learned by applying game theory." He believes that game theory protects him from making intuitive judgments that might fail, or from being distracted by information that's not necessarily germane.
Poker and life allows two ways to win: own the best hand, or make the best hand go away, sometimes by bluffing. The imperative to bluff, it turns out, is inherent.
Source: "What Would Jesus Bet?" THE NEW YORKER, March 30, 2009